New research in cows that were immunised against HIV | Hacker News Reader

New research in cows that were immunised against HIV

nhs.uk

43 pointshappy-go-lucky13 comments

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

HN title is not the article title.

I stand corrected. I mistook it for being the title of the article.

Why was the article title changed on submission?

Maybe because the submitter thought the question-type headline was even more clickbaitish?

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.

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