U.S. researchers have developed a new tool to identify powerful antibodies capable of preventing infection by the virus of HIV that causes AIDS, an advance that could help speed HIV vaccine research.

Scientists have long studied HIV-infected individuals whose blood shows powerful neutralization activity because understanding how their antibodies develop and attack the virus can yield clues for HIV vaccine design.

But until now, available methods for analyzing blood samples did not easily yield specific information about the so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) present or the parts of the virus they targeted.

In addition, determining where and how HIV bNAbs bind to the virus has been a laborious process involving several complicated techniques and relatively large quantities of blood from individual donors.

Based on data on HIV bNAbs generated in recent years, researchers from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), however, successfully designed a mathematical algorithm that can predict precisely which antibodies in a particular blood sample neutralize viruses.

Blood samples contain mixtures of antibodies, so the new algorithm calculates the specific types of HIV bNAbs present and the proportion of each by comparing the blood's neutralization data with the so-called fingerprints of known HIV bNAbs, the researchers reported online in the journal Science on Thursday.

The neutralization fingerprint of an HIV antibody is a measurement of which virus strains it can block and with what intensity. Antibodies that target the same portion of the virus tend to have similar fingerprints.

"This approach is particularly useful when other methods of determining bNAbs targets in a blood sample are not feasible, such as when just a small amount of blood is available," said the NIH in a statement.

"Neutralization fingerprinting also is significantly faster than older analytic methods," it added.

According to the researchers, the approach could also be applied to the study of human responses to other pathogens, such as influenza and hepatitis C viruses, for which scientists have much information about neutralizing antibodies.

Source: Xinhuanet