Antibodies generally attack a virus by binding with both of their "arms" to two of the spikes sticking up from the surface of the virus. Caltech researchers propose that HIV's low spike density makes it hard for Natural Antibodies against HIV VIRUS after infection to do this. The Caltech researchers and The biologists engineered antibody-based molecules that can bind to a single HIV spike with both arms and showed that the new molecules are more than 100 times better than naturally occurring antibodies at binding to and neutralizing HIV.Thus Researcher produced 100 times MORE POTENT ANTIBODIES TO NATURAL ONE BY GENETIC ENGINEERING WHICH CAN FIGHT HIV VIRUS WELL .
"Based on the work that we have done, we now think we know how to make a really potent therapeutic that would not only work at relatively low concentrations but would also force the virus to mutate along pathways that would make it less fit and therefore more susceptible to elimination," says Pamela Bjorkman, the Max Delbrück Professor of Biology and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "If you were able to give this to someone who already had HIV, you might even be able to clear the infection."
The researchers hypothesized that one of the reasons the immune system is less effective against HIV than other viruses involves the small number and low density of spikes on HIV's surface. These spikes, each one a cluster of three protein subunits, stick up from the surface of the virus and are the targets of antibodies that neutralize HIV. While most viruses are covered with hundreds of these spikes, HIV has only 10 to 20, making the average distance between the spikes quite long.
The Caltech team is currently working to produce larger quantities of the new reagents so that they can test them in humanized mice -- specialized mice carrying human immune cells that, unlike most mice, are sensitive to HIV.