why until now we still cannot find the cure for AIDS?

Question

Please give me a specific explainations so that i can add your opinions into my research data.

Answer 1

HIV is a powerful virus. It is one of the fastest replicating viruses in nature, copying itself at amazing rates of 30,000 copies per day. The difficulty of designing antiviral drugs, along with the rate which HIV duplicates has made vaccine development an urgent priority.

Vaccines work by priming the immune sytem to respond quickly to an infection. To respond to bacterial and viral infections, immune system cells called T cells have to identify a protein from the pathogen as foreign or nonself. A fragment of nonself bacteria that triggers a response by T cells is called an Epitope. Epitopes Vaccines consists of epitomes of weakened virions. Although no actual infection occurs after vaccination, the immune system responds by activating cells that recognize the epitomes presented. If an authentic infection starts later, then the immune system is ready to rock it.

In the case of HIV, most epitomes presented to the immune system are derived from the protein called GP-120 that coats the virion's surface. But the rate that HIV evolves makes the effort of every HIV vaccine development futil. HIV evolves so fast, that is able to modify itself escaping the action of competitve or allosteric inhibitors, then duplicating itself creating stronger, more resistant virions.

Because so many different strains exist nowadays, researchers are aiming at the problem in a regional manner. A global vaccine wouldnt work with HIV because of the many subtypes and mutations. Many trials have been done only to fail, this is because of the complexity of this virus, and it wont change until this approach evolves. New antriretroviral medicines are succesfully implemented but the cost among with the side effects make them undesirable over a vaccine. The future looks very promising mainly for aniretroviral medicines but as of today vaccines have failed making HIV an incurable crhonic disease.

Answer 2

It is a retro virus, changing all the time.

It hides in a cloud of sugar and it only has a few open spaces on the surface. The body finds it difficult to make an antibody that will be able to get in there and block the receptor sites that the virus uses to bind the cell

Answer 3

The very nature of HIV means that it is hard to treat. With most diseases we help the immune system to fight the disease,. For example with a wound infection, wie give someone antibiotics to help the immune cells clear away the infection. However HIV attacks T cells (part of the immune system) and so this makes it very hard to treat since we have to destroy the immune cells to attack the HIV particles. This means that we have to "think outside the box" when it comes to finding ways to treat HIV infections.

On top of this is the mutation rate of HIV, which is approx 40 times faster than that of Influenza, making it hard to find one thing to target that doesnt change.

Your question may be a little misguided, but this is not a slur on you. Have you heard of RNAi? It stands for Ribonucleic Acid Interference, and it can be used to target RNA sequences: HIV has an RNA genome.....
A study from 2001 showed some really promising results in being able to treat HIV infected immune cells. Unfortunately, i don't have a copy of the papers url on me at the moment, but try searching pubmed or google for
"Treatment of HIV-1 infected T cell Using siRNA mediated RNAi

If you would like anymore help, email me through my homepage, or check out this website. www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk

Answer 4

because aids does not have a nucleus so it is a atom. (very small). When we use a cure it sends little "army guys" to the virus and they are "specially trained" to destroy the virus. Aids likes to change the way it looks, acts, and performes it's duty very often so any anti virus we send to it is no longer useful when aids changes again. The only thing that can track down an aids virus is another aids virus. it is so advanced.

Answer 5

For your paper---be careful who you quote, you won't get credit if a 15 year old gives you a reason.....;)
For research, goto the site below. It is the national library of medicine. Good journals that can actually be cited in a biblio...

Answer 6

u know i think the gov. has a cure for aids or they know a cure for aids but they just don't want us to know