My teacher brought up the subject of AIDS in biology and I was thinking of ways of vaccinating against the HIV that causes it. I would like to know whether it would be useful to try and vaccinate people using just the protein sheath of the virus without the RNA inside. That way they production of antibodies could be induced without the problem of the virus damaging lymphocytes and replicating.

My dad is a doctor and I would normally ask him but he is getting a bit annoyed with me constantly asking him all the random ideas I come up with.

Does anyone know if this has been tried yet?

Hi RG13,
I honestly haven't kept up with the AIDS vaccine, but from the little I know about vaccines, you are proposing something quite reasonable. I'd be very surprised if it hasn't been considered or even tried.

Have you read this review article at Scientific American?
Where is the AIDS Vaccine?: Scientific American (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-is-the-aids-vaccine)

The article is a couple of years old, which in the world of AIDS vaccines is probably an eternity, but it would be a good place to start.

Since you have probably exceeded your dad's knowledge in this area (he's probably great at what he knows!), I think you need some other mentors. I would recommend emailing some of the people mentioned in this article to see what's happened since 2007. (Of course, you can search on the web too. If you need help, talk to a university librarian.)

Anyway, I suspect one or more researchers would be happy to recommend some reading. Also, there was a recent story about an AIDS vaccine that supposedly worked, but I talked to some people who know about these things, and they were super skeptical.

That'd be this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/health/research/11hiv.html

This article in the journal Science that might interest you, too.

Science/AAAS | Science Magazine: Sign In (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;326/5949/26)

I can't post the whole thing, because that would be a violation of copyright. But if you are interested, try the library or see if your dad knows someone with an online subscription.


Science 2 October 2009:
Vol. 326. no. 5949, pp. 26 - 27
DOI: 10.1126/science.326_26
Prev | Table of Contents | Next
NEWS OF THE WEEK
HIV/AIDS RESEARCH:
Surprising AIDS Vaccine Success Praised and Pondered
Jon Cohen

Wow.

That was the reaction of many HIV/AIDS researchers last week to the news that a large clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine worked—the first success in 2 decades of effort. The two vaccines used in the study as a one-two punch had only a modest ability to protect people from HIV, and the results just barely qualified as statistically significant. Researchers will be trying to make sense of the somewhat baffling data for months if not years. But given all the failures in the field, many say that even this relatively weak signal is cause to celebrate.

The controversial $105 million trial, the largest and most expensive AIDS vaccine study ever conducted, took 6 years and involved more than 16,000 volunteers at eight sites in Thailand. An equal number of people at average risk of becoming infected with HIV were randomly assigned to receive either the vaccine combo, tailor-made to protect against strains circulating in Thailand, or a saline placebo. Participants were mainly heterosexual, and about one-fourth reported high-risk behavior such as commercial sex work or intravenous drug use.

The trial was widely expected to fail because neither of the vaccines had done well by themselves in clinical studies.. .

Also, read about GP120, the basis for one of the two vaccines used in the Thai study.

gp120 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gp120#gp120_targeted_vaccines)

Typically, what you're describing for a vaccine is one of the main ways they make vaccines.
However, HIV/AIDS is a very sneaky virus. Infection is spread by the body's immune system, as you most likely know. However, the body's ability to recognize and attempt to fight up the disease is exactly what spread it.
CD4 T cells (a type of white blood cell) recognizes that there is a foreign molecule in your body, and attempts to take it up through a process called phagocytosis so that it can 'eat it' and destroy it. When the virus is in the cell, it responds to chemical cues (a drop in pH) and begins to release it's genes into the CD4 T cell, starts replicating, and destroys the T cell in the process.

The problem is, vaccines are designed to increase recognition and uptake by the body's T cells and other white blood cells so that they have a faster response time to infection. By increasing recognition of HIV particles, you are actually HELPING the virus infect you... which is exactly what we don't want!