UCSF findings will not delay gp120, companies say

Companies developing vaccines based on the envelope proteins of HIV are not overly concerned with findings from the lab of Jay Levy at the University of California, San Francisco, that some antibodies to the envelope may enhance the infectiveness of viral strains that co-exist in the body.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that weak binding of different strains of the virus to the monoclonal antibodies targeted at other strains could be responsible for loss of neutralizing activity, or even enhance viral spread. ...