Researchers Create Interface To Help Immune System Fight HIV

Roughly one percent of the antibodies in your blood are of a type known as anti-gal, a type of antibody that is used for fighting serious infections such as Salmonella and E. coli. If you're not fighting a serious infection... well, they don't really do all that much.

For people with HIV and other serious viruses, though, that may soon change. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have created a new molecule that binds, on one end, to anti-gal. At the other end, the molecule binds to HIV. The result is that these powerful disease fighting antibodies are attached to the viruses that usually hide from them, allowing the disease fighting powers of the anti-gal antibodies to destroy the HIV viruses.

While the treatment did not eliminate the viruses' ability to infect the cells, in an in vitro test, 90 percent of the HIV viruses in the sample were unable to infect their target cells.

The group is now working to adapt the molecules so that they will bind to MRSA, an antibiotic resistant strain of staph infection that has been spreading for several years now.

RotaTeq Very Effective Against Rotavirus

The Los Angeles Times reports that RotaTeq vaccine for rotavirus has been very successful. The most recent onset of the rotavirus season was delayed by three months and reduced in severity by about half thanks to the virus, according to the CDC.

Rotavirus is the leading cause of vomiting and diarrhea in children in the U.S. and globally. In the U.S., it leads to more than 400,000 visits to doctors' offices, 272,000 emergency room trips, up to 70,000 hospitalizations, and 20 to 60 deaths. Globally, more than 500,000 children die from rotavirus each year.

Rotateq, on the other hand, can prevent rotavirus infections in 74 percent of cases. It also eliminates 98 percent of severe infections and 96 percent of hospitalizations. For these reasons, the CDC recommends that infants receive their first vaccination at 12 weeks and two more by 32 weeks of age. RotaTeq is made by Merck.

Targeting Viruses With Laser Precision

According to a Discover magazine report, a physicist at Arizone State University, Kong-Thon Tsen, has developed a way to use lasers tuned to a specific frequency of light to kill viruses. It turns out that the outer shells of viruses are rigid and have certain frequencies that can set up an unstable feedback in the harmonic oscillations of the virus' shells, destroying them.

In test tubes, Tsen's group has used this technology to destroy the outer shell—or capsid—of HIV samples. And because the capsids of viruses are different, disrupting the HIV capsids should not have any side effects within the body.

None of this research has been tested in vivo yet, but within the next couple of years Tsen's group plans to test the technology on HIV in monkeys by zapping blood outside the body. Basically, the process will use dialysis machines to cycle the blood out, destroy the viruses without affecting the blood cells, and cycle the clean blood back into the body.

The research has not been published, and more work needs to be done. In all, FDA approval is probably more than a decade away. But this technology, if proven, could be used to destroy just about any blood-borne virus.