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AIDS: New leads for treatments and vaccines
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AIDS: New leads for treatments and vaccines
Frankfurt, the financial capital of Germany.
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The city has one of the highest percentages of HIV infections and
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patients with AIDS in the country.
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The estimated total of HIV-infected people in Germany,
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Austria and Switzerland is around 80,000. The UK has 68,000.
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This is low compared with the worldwide figure of 40 million,
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but EU leaders are becoming increasingly concerned about the rise in rates of
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infection.
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Carmen had no thought of AIDS when she had sex with her boyfriend at the age of
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19.
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He was her first partner and she did not know he was HIV-positive,
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neither did he.
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Up to this point I'm fine, thank goodness, but one day I will have to begin
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treatment
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and then I'll have to start taking drugs.
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Doctors regularly monitor the level of Carmen's T-cells,
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one of the cells that fight off infections in her blood. There is nothing else they
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can do at this stage.
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What worries them is that more and more cases like Carmen's are being diagnosed
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as AIDS begins to affect Europe's heterosexual population.
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The majority of the people infected with HIV are
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homosexual men,
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but we do see an increasing number of patients who do not belong to this
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high-risk group.
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We particularly see more and more young women
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who got infected by their sexual partners without knowing it.
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This means the virus disease is spreading more and more
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outside the high-risk groups.
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What makes HIV so dangerous
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is that it infects cells in the human immune system such as helper T-cells.
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As the number of these cells decline, the body becomes progressively more
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susceptible to infections.
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Eventually the number of immune system cells are so depleted
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the body cannot protect itself, the condition called AIDS.
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In this research laboratory in Rixensa in Belgium,
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scientists search for new ways to halt the pandemic that has killed 30 million
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people since the mid-eighties.
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Virologist Gerald Voss is coordinating a team of genetic engineers from Belgium,
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France and the United Kingdom.
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Their aim is to develop a vaccine against HIV.
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In the developed world, so-called anti-retroviral treatments
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have reduced both the mortality and the morbidity of HIV infection.
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But the aim of the team is to create a vaccine, not to relieve symptoms,
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but to stop the virus entirely.
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The idea behind this project is to
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use these properties of the measles vaccine
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and transfer these properties to
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an HIV vaccine. The way this is done is to construct
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what we call a recombinant measles virus, which carries bits and pieces of HIV.
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Using the modern techniques of genetic engineering,
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parts of the HIV virus are extracted and inserted into the measles or rubeola virus.
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This changes its genetic code as well as its hull structure
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so that it can be recognized by the immune system.
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The so-called recombinant measles virus could be used as a vector
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to create a vaccine against both diseases, rubeola as well as against the
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human immunodeficiency virus
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that leads to AIDS. Gerald Vos and his team
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hope that their approach in the EU-funded project will lead to an easy to use
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and eventually relatively cheap vaccine for worldwide distribution.
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This vaccine or vaccination
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if successful
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will create a strong immune response against the HIV
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parts of the genetic construct,
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meaning that it will
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create specific immune cells that are able to
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recognize the real HIV
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virus if ever encountered.
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But the new vaccine will probably only immunize during childhood
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and might not help in cases like Carmen's. She has been living with HIV for five years
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and has now found a partner who is not infected. The couple are thinking about
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having a child together.
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It starts in the morning after getting up.
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When I brush my teeth, do I give my partner a long kiss?
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Probably not, due to gun bleeding.
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The daily routine in the bathroom, taking a shower or bath or eating from the same plate,
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that's absolutely no problem.
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Where you have to pay attention is during sex,
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blood to blood contact, during pregnancy
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and when you're breastfeeding.
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Having children is not out of reach for HIV-positive women like Carmen
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if precautions are taken.
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At the same time, Dorothea Van Leer and her team at the University of Frankfurt
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are working hard to help patients like Carmen with a promising new treatment.
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They have developed an innovative technique against the virus
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that may not only help to protect against an infection, but could also improve the
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treatment of infected persons like Carmen.
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Their key technology is the use of so-called
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aptamers, tiny pieces of genetic code
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from the human cell.
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Aptamers are a fairly new group of medications.
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They're based on nucleic acid, the same material that our genes and our genetic
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information are made from.
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These nucleic acids have the ability to fold themselves in a very specific way
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and to lock onto certain targets.
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And in our case, the target structure is on the AIDS virus.
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Together with teams in France and Britain,
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her team are searching for those pieces of aptamer particles
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that stick best to the surface proteins of the HIV virus
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in order to block them. But finding the right aptamers among millions of possible
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combinations
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is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Aptamers can prevent HIV virus
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from docking with human cells
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without triggering resistance or side effects. Aptamers could either be used as a
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means of prevention
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or as a therapy to block the spread of the HIV virus inside the body.
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Immune cells are going to be taken from the patient's body and will be changed
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genetically
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so that cells will be protected against HIV. Then they're reinserted back into the
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body of the patient.
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There they could be active immunologically and reconstruct the immune system
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without being attacked by the immune defense.
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- Idioma/s:
- Niveles educativos:
- ▼ Mostrar / ocultar niveles
- Nivel Intermedio
- Autor/es:
- The European Union
- Subido por:
- EducaMadrid
- Licencia:
- Reconocimiento - No comercial - Sin obra derivada
- Visualizaciones:
- 689
- Fecha:
- 7 de agosto de 2007 - 10:21
- Visibilidad:
- Público
- Enlace Relacionado:
- European Commission
- Duración:
- 06′ 55″
- Relación de aspecto:
- 4:3 Hasta 2009 fue el estándar utilizado en la televisión PAL; muchas pantallas de ordenador y televisores usan este estándar, erróneamente llamado cuadrado, cuando en la realidad es rectangular o wide.
- Resolución:
- 448x336 píxeles
- Tamaño:
- 34.72 MBytes
