ViroBlogy

…and hep A steals membranes from liver cells to circulate as an enveloped particle(s) in blood. This is a fascinating find, and doubtless will be followed by similar for other viruses.

The commentary has some speculation as to how vacciens work, if antibodies can’t see the virus – but they forget the virus has to get INTO the host in the first place, and environmental forms are non-enveloped, AND that the vaccine may well elicit some degree of cell-mediated immunity, which would target infected cells displaying degraded protein on tehir surfaces via MHC I-type receptors.

"…clinical trials of vaccines made to protect against other viruses in the H7 family have shown the vaccines don’t induce much of an immune response, even when people are given what would be considered very large doses."

This is a little worrying – and possibly a spur to making universal vaccines!

A-frakkin’-men….

Excellent graphic!

OK, not new nws, but something I will pay attaention to, at my age…B-)

Virus Rules OK!  Thanks @AJCann.

"The gene sequences confirm that this is an avian virus, and that it is a low pathogenic form (meaning it is likely to cause mild disease in birds)," said Wendy Barclay, a flu virologist at Britain’s Imperial College London.

"But what the sequences also reveal is that there are some mammalian adapting mutations in some of the genes."

Sinister…but interesting that a LPAI should be so lethal in humans??

And so it begins…hopefully NOT!

So they say they have a strategy to mimic natural infection, where an arms race between generation of antibody binding site diveristy and Env epitopes results in increasingly good neutralising antibodies to Env – and that this could lead to a vaccine.

Um.  Yeeeessss…for a single patient, given that this is what they followed??  And now that they will follow other single patients, might they not show that each person’s responses evolve completely differently?

So this is good science – in fact, it is GREAT science.  However – right now that is all it is; like so much of HIV research, answering hypothesis-generated questions leads to more more hypotheses, and more good science, and more publications….BUT NO VACCINES.  In fact, the ONLY vaccines which have made it into Phase III clinical trial are nothing like what people seem to think will work, and only got there because the people who pushed for the trials pretty much ignored the basic scientists.

A potential flaw in the whole approach is looking at what NATURAL infections do.  That this may not be relevant is shown by the case of one of the most successful of recent vaccines, which is Human papillomavirus (HPV) VLPs, because the virus infects epithelial cells in a topical manner, is cleared by cell-mediated immune responses and elicits only weak antibody responses which are protective, whereas the vaccine is given via injection, and elicits very high neutralising antibody responses which are protective – but are of no use against established infections.

But the trains roll on, and new approaches keep getting unearthed, and maybe we will yet get efficacious HIV vaccines.

Maybe.