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【drug-news】HIV疫苗开发：黑暗中摸索
We're not even close to finding a vaccine for HIV. So what hope does Harriet Robinson have?
Twenty-five years after the discovery of the virus that causes aids, there is still no vaccine. Last fall Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ) dashed hopes when more volunteers getting its vaccine got infected than those who got a placebo.
Now comes Harriet Robinson, a 70-year-old microbiologist in Atlanta and something of an outsider in the HIV-vaccine world. Robinson and her six-year-old company, GeoVax, hope to begin a 500-person trial this summer with a vaccine that has already demonstrated its safety in humans and efficacy in monkeys. The vaccine protected 21 out of 22 monkeys for four years.
GeoVax's vaccine is unusual in that it stimulates two immune responses at once (both T-cells and antibodies). It has just two components and is cheap and simple to manufacture.
Raising money could be a problem for GeoVax, a penny stock traded on the Over the Counter (OTC). In November it won a third five-year $15 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, but because it is a for-profit company aiming at the lucrative U.S. market, it lacks access to the deepest pockets in HIV research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the International aids Vaccine Initiative, both of which aim at eradicating HIV in the poorest regions of the world.
HIV has thwarted vaccine research for so long because the virus is a clumsy replicator of itself. The immune system can't figure out which of its many forms to fight off. By stimulating two immune responses, GeoVax's vaccine at least could give the immune system a fighting chance. It's impossible to project how the vaccine will work in humans; monkeys contract a different form of HIV than humans do.
Robinson is used to blazing trails. In the 1960s she was one of the rare women among those receiving Ph.D.s in microbiology at MIT, and later studied retroviruses as a fellow at UC, Berkeley. She married and spent the next ten years raising her three sons in the Bay Area. But divorce threw her into the job market in 1978, and she moved her family to Massachusetts to study cancer-causing viruses at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, which had just settled a gender-discrimination lawsuit. "They needed a woman, and I needed a job," she says.
In the 1990s Robinson used chicken eggs to study HIV structure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and left in 1998 to become chief of microbiology at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Emory backed her and Donald Hildebrand, now chief executive, to start GeoVax, which raised $10 million and listed publicly by merger with a shell corporation.
Robinson likes her vaccine's two-pronged defense. "There is no doubt in my mind that a successful vaccine is possible," she says. 该文本人已认领，若四十八小时未给出结果，请其他战友继续 We're not even close to finding a vaccine for HIV. So what hope does Harriet Robinson have?
我们甚至还没有找到比较HIV疫苗的方法。那么哈瑞特-罗宾森带来了什么样的希望呢？
Twenty-five years after the discovery of the virus that causes aids, there is still no vaccine. Last fall Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ) dashed hopes when more volunteers getting its vaccine got infected than those who got a placebo.
在发现病毒导致艾滋病之后25年，还是没有疫苗出现。去年秋天，那些接受默克公司疫苗的志愿者感染艾滋的病例比注射安慰剂的人还多，这打击了人们的信心。
Now comes Harriet Robinson, a 70-year-old microbiologist in Atlanta and something of an outsider in the HIV-vaccine world. Robinson and her six-year-old company, GeoVax, hope to begin a 500-person trial this summer with a vaccine that has already demonstrated its safety in humans and efficacy in monkeys. The vaccine protected 21 out of 22 monkeys for four years.
现在轮到哈瑞特-罗宾森出场了，一个70岁亚特兰大的微生物学家，在HIV疫苗方面是个局外人。罗宾森和她的六岁的伙伴，吉欧，希望今年夏天开展一个500人的疫苗试验，这个疫苗的安全性在人身上和效应在猴子身上已经得到了证明。疫苗对22只猴子中的21只保护了4年。
GeoVax's vaccine is unusual in that it stimulates two immune responses at once (both T-cells and antibodies). It has just two components and is cheap and simple to manufacture.
吉欧的疫苗非常特殊，因为它一次刺激两种免疫反应（包括T细胞和抗体两种）。它只有两种成分，非常的便宜而且生产非常简单。
Raising money could be a problem for GeoVax, a penny stock traded on the Over the Counter (OTC). In November it won a third five-year $15 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, but because it is a for-profit company aiming at the lucrative U.S. market, it lacks access to the deepest pockets in HIV research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the International aids Vaccine Initiative, both of which aim at eradicating HIV in the poorest regions of the world.
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2010-12-12 06:42
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