CROI - San Francisco 2010

The Meeting of CROI opened up with a young investigator session. This is a session that was well attended with over 500 young investigators including Anthony Fauci head of the CDC. The initial talk was by Richard Koup form the Vaccine and research Center of the NIAID and the NIH. As people keeping up with the field of vaccines know HIV vaccines have suffered a blow in recent years. The Merck-Government large scale trial failed a couple of years ago to offer the people who got the vaccine any protection from HIV. A hold on funding for research for Vaccines from the Government was put on hold until more basic research could be developed.

We are starting to get some of that very important Research. Focus is now on the effector Tells namely CD 8 cells. It has been known for a pretty long time that an elevation of CD 8 in people who are infected with HIV is good. These people do better with or without antiretroviral therapy. In fact the non progressors and the innate survivors of HIV infection all had elevated CD 8 levels. Now attention is being directed to CD 8 vaccines. Agents that stimulate CD 8 cells are being developed that elevated the CD 8 cells in a persons body hoping that this will offer some type of protection from HIV. The verdict is still out but the CD 8 cell is an important marker for a patient doing well in their HIV infection.

The other part of the immune system that is very important if a successful immune response is to be developed from a vaccine is neutralizing antibodies. In general the higher the neutralizing antibody the more protection from HIV, and vaccines that stimulate neutralizing antibodies are the one most likely to be candidates for protection from HIV. There are really no effective vaccines at this time that stimulates high levels of neutralizing antibody.

Finally a monoclonal antibody that blocks HIV has stimulated the interest of researchers. A lot of research is going on in this area. One thing that is certain about our foundations work with bone marrow stem cells.is we need to do find more markers namely antibodies of define the postive effect we have seen with blue green algae. We need to monitor NK cells, neutralizing antibodies, to see what effect of blue green algae has on these important immunological markers.