
New research in cows that were immunised against HIV - happy-go-lucky
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2017/07July/Pages/Could-cows-be-the-clue-that-leads-to-an-HIV-vaccine.aspx
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mabbo
Cow. Singular.

> One cow in particular showed an impressive immune response to most of the
> lab strains of HIV

The other 3 had a mild immune response.

This is first steps, not breakthrough.

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Protostome
Hi, that's an interesting study.

Cows are known to have antibodies with unique conformations, probably since
their metabolism involves bacterias much more than other mammals, such as
ourselves. Antibodies are molecules that are generated by B-Cells and upon
exposure to an invader, some antibodies go through rapid evolution.

The unique conformation of a cow antibody allows it to bind to deep pockets
and places that human antibodies may have some difficulties reaching. With
that said, while this research is interesting, the implications for human
therapeutics are mostly negligible.

Cow's antibody cannot be transferred safely to humans since they will elicit
an immune reaction and will probably be considered a foreign invader. Also,
there's no shortage in human origin broadly neutralizing antibodies for HIV.
Those are still not considered the best line of defence.

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autokad
makes sense, i believe the current understanding is that HIV spread from
bovines to felines, so they would have the longest history of fighting the
virus

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rimliu
Article feels somewhat weird when you remember that H in HIV stands for
"Human".

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theprotocol
The dissonance between that title versus the actual contents completely
destroys what would otherwise be an interesting, albeit not especially
remarkable read.

The article itself makes no attempt to live up to the title, and in fact
downplays it throughout the whole thing, almost as if admitting "yes, I got
you to click, now here's a fairly normal article."

edit: 2nd paragraph is my mistake, it's the HN title that I'm critical of, not
the article title.

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timthorn
The article title seems quite measured: "Could cows be the clue that leads to
an HIV vaccine?"

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scotu
The HN title is "Cows have shown an 'insane' and 'mind-blowing' ability to
tackle HIV" as I post this comment, which is probably why @theprotocol had
that impression

~~~
theprotocol
Yep, it was my mistake. I believed when I wrote my response that it was the
article title.

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whiddershins
Why was the article title changed on submission?

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dang
It's the first sentence of the article, which can often be used as an
alternative title, though obviously in this case the baitiness is so strong
that the title itself becomes the story. In such cases it's better to look for
a representative phrase from the article text that's both accurate and
neutral. I've changed the title above to one of those.

