Not my area of scientific knowledge, but this is a really exciting field!
One of the current challenges being worked on is how to train individuals to make these complex antibodies. We've isolated these from people with long-term exposures to HIV, showing that the body can generate these broadly neutralizing antibodies.
Some current work is focusing on developing a series of peptides that can coax HIV negative individuals to make these complex antibodies.
Interesting, I hadn't heard about that theory of HIV transmission. Do you think that having appropriate IgA secretions in the female genital tract might decrease initial infections?
1) I think what is understood about the immune system is really, really over-exaggerated. One specific thing is that a lot of studies regarding antibodies may be messed up by the presence of natively unfolded proteins (which will react with any antibody raised towards beta-sheets and give inaccurate mass estimates on western blot). Every anti-body is promiscuous, it just matters how much.
2) Notice I have no quantification or numbers associated with these ideas. As far as I know, no one has ever spent the time to work this out into a real model that can make precise predictions. Accordingly, consider them wild speculations.
3) According to this sketch of an idea, anything that contributes to identifying and lysing non-self cells should reduce transmission in a given tissue.
Your immune system can and does fight the HIV virus, it does loses that fight because HIV attacks the immune system, can hide for years, and has a cell to cell infection vector.
The immune system is also limited to what it can do, and when viruses can spread cell to cell there isn't much it can do since there is little to no attack surface available for the immune system to work with in that case.
Antibody and therapeutic vaccines can be used as post exposure treatments and combined with other regiments to help slow down or even control the progress of HIV and AIDS in already afflicted patients.
A therapeutic vaccine with a regiment of reverse-transcriptase inhibitors and a treatment to control cell suicide upon infection can probably be developed for HIV and for other retroviruses, well excluding the antibodies it is what we already are doing today mostly.
I am an absolute noob in science, but still want to ask out of curiosity. If a biological virus can have a cell to cell infection vector, can't an anti-body or immunogen also have a cell-to-cell "replenishing" factor?
Like mentioned already by another poster antibodies are an extracellular mechanism, they do not function within the cell.
Cell to call transfer and communication happens all the time, cells share nutrients and many other things, some viruses take advantage of that mechanism allowing them to basically cross cellular and tissue boundaries.
Some can exploit this to the extreme by actually replicating only parts of themselves in each cell and using the cell to cell transfer highway to be finally assembled in another cell, this is often used to prevent cell suicide since one of the intracellular defense mechanism is basically the cell invoking cell death upon detecting an infection.
If you want an analogy from the technology world think about it as staged payloads that some malware use, each payload on it's own is undetectable and even non-functional but when everything reaches the final target all the payloads are assembled into the final piece of malware that takes over the targeted host ;)
There are quite a few other sources on Google, overall viruses are pretty sneaky, some of them even ask the cell politely to establish new cell to cell contacts to facilitate cell to cell infection.
You might also like to look up virus assembly and budding, since it's also a pretty interesting topic, you might have viruses that do cell to cell infection of their naked forms then the final polymerization of their shells happens in another cell and they might even do the final budding in another.
Expect nightmares tho ;)
P.S.
Cell to cell transfers might also be called exocytosis (sometimes also called reversed endocytosis) (exit) and endocytosis (entry) so if you are googling and can't find what you need might need to use the scientific terms.
Antibodies are secreted extracellularly so they won't be any use unless the HIV antigens are expressing on the outside of the cell. There are defense mechanisms for dealing with intracellular viruses but these do not involve antibodies.
A virus hijacks the resources of a host cell to create copies of itself. These copies can then then move into nearby cells and hijack those too, setting off a biological chain reaction.
An antibody is just a protein molecule with no ability to create copies of itself. It might move from one cell to another, but that does create a new synthesizer of the antibody at the new location, and so does not trigger a spread of the antibody throughout the tissue or organism.
There are long-term controllers. Some of these people are able to suppress HIV for 10-30 years before eventually developing AIDS. Others have yet to develop AIDS and seem to suppress HIV permanently. That shouldn't be a surprise - some primates species do the same with SIV, basically controlling it permanently.
I see the comments about cell-to-cell infection; I don't know what it is about these controllers but it doesn't seem to be a problem for them.
One of the current challenges being worked on is how to train individuals to make these complex antibodies. We've isolated these from people with long-term exposures to HIV, showing that the body can generate these broadly neutralizing antibodies.
Some current work is focusing on developing a series of peptides that can coax HIV negative individuals to make these complex antibodies.