APS March 07: Vaccination—one lymph node at a time
Michael Deem of Rice University has an interesting vaccination strategy for HIV: vaccinate different parts of the body against different strains of the virus.
Deem claims that current vaccination plans have a weakness. If you vaccinate for one particular strain of HIV, the immune system will produce too many T-cells for that strain, while ignoring other dangerous variants. By injecting different vaccines into different lymph nodes (where T-cells get made), his mathematical calculations show that you could produce a more balanced immune response.
Of course, that’s all a little abstract since there isn’t an HIV vaccine yet. But the same strategy could work for different strains of Dengue Fever (there are apparently four). Deem says that he will soon test his ideas on animal subjects.
