Treatment Turns On Anti-HIV Immunity, Holds AIDS Virus in Check http://my.webmd.com/content/Article/97/104268.htm By Daniel DeNoon Nov. 29, 2004 -- It worked in mice. It worked in monkeys. And now in humans, a therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks. The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders. HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show Collapse that when dendritic cells are "loaded" with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS. Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, teste...