Novel Research on Broad Spectrum Neutralizing Antibodies for HIV Treatment

AIDS is an extremely dangerous infectious disease caused by HIV, a virus that takes the most important CD4T lymphocytes in the human immune system as its main target and destroys a large number of these cells, causing the body to lose its immune function. Therefore, AIDS patients are susceptible to various diseases and can develop malignant tumors and have a high death rate.

In the long journey of fighting against AIDS, scientists have not stopped exploring. As there is no effective vaccine on market yet, patients have to take antiviral drugs for life, and there are many problems such as poor adherence and drug resistance.

In recent years, a variety of new anti-HIV therapies have emerged, among which broad-spectrum neutralizing antibodies, as one of the most cutting-edge hotspots, are expected to play an important role in the functional cure or even the eradication of AIDS, bringing a disruptive breakthrough.

It is well known that HIV is a very cunning adversary that changes very quickly, and whenever it encounters an attack by the human immune system, it quickly changes to escape from the hunt, which is very conducive to its long-term survival and continuous transmission in the host.

In the process of the fighting between the human body and the virus, a special anti-HIV component, broad-spectrum neutralizing antibodies, has been produced, which can recognize the areas on the surface of the HIV strain that are not easily changed, thus having the ability to capture multiple strains, inhibit the replication of the virus in the patient's body, and effectively reduce the level of HIV in the human body.

However, it is very difficult to produce this type of HIV killer in naturally infected people, and only 10-15% of people infected with HIV can produce neutralizing antibodies, of which only 2%-5% have broad-spectrum neutralizing antibodies, i.e., they can neutralize more than 80% of HIV strains prevalent worldwide.

Studies have shown that the production of broad-spectrum neutralizing antibodies may be related to factors such as viral load, viral diversity, and duration of infection.

With deepening interdisciplinary collaboration and great progress in the field of technology, scientists can successfully isolate purified antibodies with broad-spectrum neutralizing activity from the blood of infected patients and actively promote anti-HIV research. Broad-spectrum neutralizing antibodies can kill the virus not only by directly neutralizing the virus strain, but also by stimulating other immune components in the body to work together to kill the virus, achieving the dual purpose of boosting immunity and killing the virus.

On February 2, 2022, researchers at the Institute Pasteur in France published a paper in Nature Communications on the mechanism of HIV neutralizing antibodies as a therapeutic tool. This study used immunofluorescence techniques and electron microscopy to analyze the CD4bs of HIV neutralizing antibodies, V1/2 and V3 epitopes antibodies that form immune complexes with viral particles on the surface of infected cells in aggregates.

This study determined the antiviral activity of neutralizing antibodies in addition to their neutralizing and Fc effects, i.e., they impede HIV release by binding viral particles to the surface of infected cells.

Due to the current impressive performance of HIV broad-spectrum neutralizing antibodies in animal and clinical trials, an increasing number of antibodies have been explored in trials for clinical treatment. In addition, for AIDS diagnosis, research also found that HIV infection appears to alter natural antibody levels in ways that may increase the risk of atherosclerosis and may impact the pathogenesis of rheumatic heart disease (RHD), indicating different autoantibodies self-components may be used as early biomarkers for AIDS detection.

Scientists are still working on the exploration of antibodies covering both neutralizing antibody for AIDS treatment and natural autoantibody for AIDS diagnosis, and it’s believed that these strategies will pave the way for a universal cure of HIV and significantly reduce the number of people who today still struggle with the disease.

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