Jean Marie Andrie (Nobel prize candidate) - News from 5th NESA Inrternational Surgical Conference
Université Paris-Descartes, Paris, France
In acute viral infections (such as poliomyelitis, smallpox,
measles, Hepatitis B and many others), the virus entering the body for the
first time proliferates in its target cells; at the same time, it induces
neutralizing antibodies that, although they develop too late to prevent the
pathology, eventually eradicate the virus and neutralize any further attack by
the same virus. Such viral infections are vaccinable with compositions that are
generally made of inactivated virus (or chosen parts of it) and of an adjuvant
amplifying the antibody production. Such vaccines generate antiviral antibodies
that neutralize and eradicate the
virus before it attacks its target cells.
HIV infection is not a vaccinable
infection since the antiviral antibodies raised during the primary infection
result in a viral control which is only partial and transitory ; the result is
a progressive destruction of the immune system that ends eventually in the
various fatal manifestations of
HIV. Faced to the challenge
of that apparently non-vaccinable infection, vaccinologists have tried over the
last 25 years to develop prototypes incorporating newly identified viral
peptides/epitopes (or their DNA sequences) susceptible to play a role in the
infectious process.
So far, however, their efforts were unsuccessful. In the
present talk, I will describe the alternative approach I developed over the
last 5 years with my colleague Wei Lu. We based our research on the observation that a very small percentage
(<1%) of HIV-infected patients as well as some SIV-infected macaques (identified as elite controllers or “EC”)
have a strong but non-antibody-dependant control of virus replication (despite
the virus still latently infects the nucleus of their target CD4+T-cells).
First, we showed that SIV replication of EC manaques was
suppresed by a set of T regulatory cells with a CD8 phenotype. We then
developed a new type of vaccine thatdoes not induce SIV-specific antibodies but
SIV-specific regulatory CD8+T-cells. We showed that vaccinated monkeys were
protected for >1 year from several SIV challenges. It remains to know
whether such a suppressive T-cells vaccine is transferable in humans to prevent
and treat HIV infection.
