Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who have been researching AIDS for almost a decade, have come up with a novel new way to fight the immunovirus. Traditional vaccines didn’t seem to be working, so Dr. Philip Johnson, chief scientific officer at Children’s Hospital, shifted gears, and used muscles to deliver a gene in order to create a protein that interferes with the virus. Yay science!

Says Dr. Johnson:

Your muscle cells, we deposit the vaccine, it’s actually a gene, and it makes a protein, and in this case, interferes with a virus and your muscles make the protein. It actually gets into the circulation, and there it does it’s [sic] thing, it blocks the virus from infecting.

You can read the research paper entitled Vector-mediated gene transfer engenders long-lived neutralizing activity and protection against SIV infection in monkeys at Nature.com. The work to date has proven effective in mice, and then in monkeys. Human trials are next, to see if the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is different from the Simian Immunodeficiency virus.

Via Philebrity.