Tag Archives: HIV

Science History

10 Women of Color in Science History: Medicine

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It’s Women’s History Month, and in the Science Twitterverse, that means it’s a time for collages, lists, and black-and-white photos of famous women from science history.

Universities, non-profits, and journalists all love to honor the month by highlighting women’s contribution’s to science. This year it feels especially poignant due to the recent passing of Vera Rubin and Mildred Dresselhaus, both of whom were on shortlists for “Most Likely to Break the 54-Year Streak of Women Not Winning the Nobel Prize for Physics.” However, most #WomeninSTEM tributes largely leave out a key group of people: the women of color who have contributed to STEM. 

Some tributes–like the two below–do a decent job of including key women from underrepresented minorities in STEM history.

 

 

Others not so much…

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Pitch Imperfect

The Case of the Sugars that “Strike Back” Against HIV

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[Electromicrograph of an HIV-infected T-cell via NIAID & CC2.0] 

“Pitch Imperfect” is a series of blog posts where I highlight stories that I pitched but didn’t quite sell and discuss why it was tough to sell them. The goal is to share both interesting research stories and some of the obstacles in getting them into the news cycle.

Proposed Headline:

Sugar signals force HIV out of hiding

Proposed Dek:

And the same sugar signalling pathway “poisons the virus on the way out”

The Pitch:

Anti-retroviral therapies can block HIV’s attempts to infect new cells in patients but do nothing to get rid of HIV sleeper cells that are already in the patient’s blood stream. The immune system can’t spot infected cells unless the HIV is actively building viruses.

However, a paper in PLOS Pathogens may have revealed an unexpected ally in the fight against HIV–the sugar coatings on immune cells. Having sugars on the surface of a cell isn’t unusual; surface-sugars serve as ID-badges that allow immune cells to tell self from not-self. But they’re usually thought of as relatively passive in cell-to-cell communications. This study indicates that yanking on a certain class of surface sugar can start a chain reaction that forces HIV into the open.

“Even though it seems kind of counter-intuitive to wake up the HIV, it really boils down to: the infected cells will die if we wake them up,” says the study’s senior co-author Satish Pillai of the Blood Systems Research Institute in San Francisco.

The paper came out on Thursday, but a Google News search turned up zero hits.

Sugars, in general, are relatively underused in next-gen medicine strategies–while genes, proteins, and RNAs hog all the glory–but they may have been potential allies ambushing HIV, hiding in plain sight.

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Science No Chaser

HIV Vaccine Origins: New Insight Into League of Extraordinary Immune Cells

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[Portrait of an HIV virus by Dominic Alves via Creative Commons & Flickr]

Y’know that feeling when you stumble across a study that makes you think, “Holy s***! Scientists actually did this!!!!”? And then like two weeks later, another team of scientists manages to kind of upstage the first team’s finding?

It’s been that sort of month for HIV vaccine research. A few weeks back, I wrote  about a team of researchers who managed to decrypt the origin story of an extremely effective strain of HIV-fighting antibodies for The Atlantic. 

I highly recommend reading The Atlantic piece for a full explanation (and also reading The Atlantic’s science and health coverage more generally, because the whole crew over there is pretty awesome)  but here’s the context you need to know:

“Immune cells called B cells build antibodies, tiny protein warheads that seek out and destroy viruses. But because HIV mutates so rapidly, these antibodies are generally ineffective—by the time B cells learn to build antibodies against one version of HIV, a new viral mutant has already taken over.” -me in The Atlantic

B-cells change their antibody designs by mutating at the DNA level. You literally have a team of microscopic mutants protecting your bloodstreams. 

The vast majority of antibodies that those mutant b-cells build suck. But in a few HIV-infected people, the b-cells manage to start building “broadly-neutralizing” antibodies that can disable all sorts of HIV mutants. Researchers love those broadly-neutralizing antibodies (which they’ve nicknamed “Bnabs”) because if researchers could find a way to get HIV-binding bnabs into uninfected people’s blood streams, those people would probably be immune to HIV. 

The Cell paper I wrote up for The Atlantic was a big deal because it marked the first time researchers were able to observe all of the changes that went into transforming an ineffective antibody into an HIV-killing bnab. Then, two weeks later, Science drops this bomb:

Another team of researchers found a way to measure whether individual b-cells have the potential to make a versatile HIV-killing antibody.

Turns out: about 1 in every 700,000 b-cells has the talent.

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