UpbeatHIV found a way around a shield antibody — South African scientists mapped the escape, and the next shields hold
A preventive antibody called VRC01 was tested in more than 4,600 volunteers across Africa, the Americas and Europe: it stopped about 75% of infections from HIV strains sensitive to it, but not infections overall. Now a South African-led team — Penny Moore at Wits University, Carolyn Williamson at the University of Cape Town and US partners — has read 11,730 HIV genetic sequences from trial participants to see exactly how the virus slipped past. Escape mutations appeared in 8 of 26 people who received the antibody and none of the 21 on placebo, and those escapes are vanishingly rare in the wider world (in under 1% of circulating virus), suggesting they cost the virus dearly. Best of all, newer, stronger antibodies such as N6 and 1-18 still worked against the escapees. The study, in Nature Microbiology, hands vaccine designers a map of the virus's few ways out.
SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation