Systemic lupus and HIV

Phenomenal ability of the body of one patient - hope for doctors and patients to defeat HIV. American researchers now hope by studying the patient's unique immunity to create a vaccine against HIV.

A patient suffering from a rare combination of diseases - systemic lupus and HIV - has helped scientists to develop the key ideas for new strategies against AIDS / HIV. In an article published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the research team from the Institute Dartmouth College Duke University and Stanford University described in detail how the immune system of this patient produces the desired type of neutralizing antibodies - they will become the basis for developing a new vaccine.

Systemic lupus erythematosus or SLE is a disease in which the immune system attacks its own cells and tissues of the body. "For years we were looking for, but have now found a single person with a unique combination of SLE and chronic HIV infection. It was necessary to determine how the patient's immune system produces a sufficient amount of neutralizing antibodies. This will help us in the future to create a vaccine that "teach" the human body to fight HIV at the first contact, and thus help to avoid infection.

Due to complex immune responses, involving these neutralizing antibodies, too aggressive immunity, which leads to severe symptoms of lupus, simultaneously helps a person "curb" immunodeficiency virus. Scientists warn that their findings in no way suggest if patients with systemic lupus are immune to HIV, so they, like all people, have to be careful. Rather, it says that when people with lupus, infected with HIV, their immune system can produce enough neutralizing antibodies - but unfortunately this is not enough to help them fight off infection.