Cure for HIV /AIDS

AIDS vaccine in final testing

Twenty years after HIV geneticist Bette Korber first began tackling HIV, her hard work—some would say "obsession"—may be finally paying off as she and her team gear up for the first round of human trials of an HIV vaccine.

Early tests showed powerful immune responses in animals and raised hopes around the world of finally achieving a scientific breakthrough in the AIDS health crisis.

Now the vaccine is down to the crucial greenlight/red light stage: will human reactions to the vaccine be safe and effective in treatments during this critical trial phase?

"It has been the focus of my life to make a vaccine happen," she said. "At this point, because of the results in animal studies, I'm confident this is a good approach that merits testing in humans."

Zoom in on Los Alamos science:

Korber and her team of experts used Lab funding to computationally design a set of proteins, called mosaic proteins, that when combined maximize the vaccine coverage of HIV diversity by including a few optimally designed viral proteins, instead of just one protein.

It's no surprise to those in the know that these breakthroughs occurred at Los Alamos, a research facility that pioneered AIDS research and that houses the world's largest HIV database.

source: http://www.lanl.gov/news/stories/aids_vaccine_in_final_testing.html