Dogs may be man's best friend, but it looks like cats could save millions of people! Researchers discovered that cats could be the key to a Successful human HIV vaccine. Pretty wild! To find out just How cats could be the key, keep on reading!
Both HIV and AIDS don't have a cure. previous attempts at creating an immunization of each have failed. There may however be a key in FIV(feline immunodeficiency virus), which is the cat version of human HIV:
"One major reson why there has been no successful HIV vaccine to date is that we do not knw which parts of HIV to combine to produce the most effective vaccine," said janet yamamoto, Ph,D., a professor of retroviral immunology at the UF college of veterinary medicine and the study's corresponding author.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Blood from HIV-infected human subjects shows an immune response against a cat AIDS virus protein, a surprise finding that could help scientists find a way to develop a human AIDS vaccine, report university of Florida and University of California, san Francisco researchers.
Professor Yamamoto Continues:
"In humans, some peptides stimulate immune responses, which either enhance HIV infection or have no effect at all, while others may have anti-HIV activities that are lost when the virus changes or mutates to avoid such immunity. so, we are looking for those viral peptides in the cat AIDS virus that can induce anti-HIV T-cell activities and do not mutate."
So, basically the researchers think that using cats to identify certain peptides that produce human T-cells to fight off HIV could lead to an HIV immunization!