A MOLECULE that transforms spare antibodies into a weapon against HIV could provide a new way to treat infections.
The human body naturally contains antibodies known as anti-gal, which typically make up 1 per cent of all antibodies in the blood. These help to fight pathogens such as salmonella and Escherichia coli by binding to a sugar on their surface. But unless you are fighting a serious infection, many go unused. 鈥淢ost of the time these antibodies don鈥檛 do much, so we thought it would be useful if we could teach them to recognise HIV,鈥� says at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
His team have created a molecule which contains the sugar group that anti-gal recognises, allowing it to latch on to the antibody, and a mimic of a receptor that HIV attaches to on human immune cells, allowing it to bind to the virus as well. The idea is for the molecule to act like a kind of adaptor plug, binding first to anti-gal and then dragging these antibodies to the virus in order to trigger a chain of events that destroy it.
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Indeed, when the researchers added the adaptor molecules, together with anti-gal and HIV, to a culture of human cells, 90 per cent of the virus was prevented from infecting the cells (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
of AIDS research foundation amfAR says the adaptors show how we might 鈥渦se the immune system in a surprising and intriguing way鈥�.
Vahlne, who also works for the company in Stockholm, which hopes to commercialise the adaptors, is planning to tweak them so that natural antibodies can be recruited as killers of the deadly hospital superbug MRSA. The next step is to test the HIV-specific adaptors in mice.
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