Dec. 10, 2012 Having HIV/AIDS is no longer a death sentence, but
it's still a lifelong illness that requires an expensive daily
cocktail of drugs -- and it means tolerating those drugs' side
effects and running the risk of resistance. Researchers at The
Rockefeller University may have found something better: they've
shown that a therapeutic approach harnessing proteins from the
human immune system can suppress the virus in mice without the
need for daily application and could one day be used in humans
to treat the disease. Florian Klein and colleagues in Michel
Nussenzweig's Laboratory of Molecular Immunology found that a
combination of five different antibodies -- proteins the immune
system uses to fight infection -- effectively suppressed HIV-1
replication and kept the virus at bay for a 60 day period after
termination of therapy thanks to their longer half-life, while
current antiretroviral drugs require daily intake. These
especially potent antibodies were only recently discovered, some
of them by several