A shot in the dark may have helped scientists find the light at the end of the tunnel.
A team of researchers led by Simon Fraser University scientist Ralph Pantophlet says they’ve stumbled onto a bacterium that contains unique, unnatural sugar molecules that closely resembles those found on the HIV virus.
The discovery, profiled in the latest Chemistry & Biology journal, could potentially yield the first vaccine for the virus.
“We’ve known for a while the surface of HIV have sugar molecules on it that cloak it from the immune system,” said Pantophlet. “I used to work with bacterium and reached out to former colleagues to see if any of them have sugar molecules that resemble the unique structure of those on HIV.”
The sugar coating on HIV prevents the body from recognizing the virus as a foreign entity.
Pantophlet’s theory was that the immune system quickly recognizes bacterium as foreign and begins to produce antibodies, so if our systems can be trained to attack matching sugar molecules found on HIV it could pave the way for an effective vaccine.
“This was a complete shot in the dark, an idea that sort of emerged from my background with bacterium,” said Pantophlet. “I didn’t even know if this bacterium existed.”
But Pantophlet asked around anyway and was floored when a colleague came back to him with Rhizobium radiobacter, a bacterium that has the same thick sugar molecules on it as the HIV virus.
The team now believes they may be onto a way of tricking the body into immediately producing antibodies when it recognizes the sugar compound on HIV.
Similar methods have been used to produce sugar-based vaccines for meningitis and childhood pneumonia.
The team is now seeking grant funding from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research to continue its work.
Panophlet is hopeful a vaccine could be reality in five to six years if all goes well, but admits developing a vaccine for HIV has been “challenging to say the least” for the medical community for decades.
Local news from metronews.ca/vancouver
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