医学突破意味着终于要找到HIV疫苗了

Thinking back, I remember the hysteria over AIDS which gripped the ­country in the 80s. I even made a TV programme aimed at calming the alarm.

回忆过去，我还记得八十年代当艾滋病席卷整个国家时人们歇斯底里的状态。我甚至还做了一个平息骚动的电视节目。

Such was the fear surrounding HIV, I was unable to make the programme with an AIDS sufferer (a woman who had contracted the condition through a contaminated blood transfusion) in a TV studio. Instead, I was forced to take the crew to a working men’s club in Bradford.

当时人们对HIV十分恐惧，因此我未能在演播室和一位艾滋病患者做电视节目（她通过血液传输感染了艾滋病）。所以，我被迫把工作人员带到了布拉德福德的工人俱乐部。

Back then, treating the infection was difficult enough, so the idea of a vaccine against HIV was a pipe dream. But science marches on. We’re on the brink of having that longed-for vaccine. And it’s being called the “silver bullet”.

当时，治疗艾滋病已经十分困难，所以研发HIV疫苗的想法简直就是白日梦。但科学不断进步。我们就快要找到渴望已久的疫苗了，也就是所谓的“新技术”。

The big hurdle has been identifying specific killer immune cells that stay in the body long enough to stop the Aids virus spreading. International researchers, working in collaboration, believe they have solved the problem. They have “unblocked” a process in the HIV virus itself which was preventing our antibody-generating B-cells in the immune system from making antibodies to kill the virus. Who knew the Aids virus was so clever?

难点就是找到特定的杀伤性免疫细胞，这些细胞可以长时间留在体内以阻止艾滋病病毒的传播。一同合作的国际研究人员认为他们已经解决了这个问题。他们已经在HIV病毒里面“解除了”一个过程，能够预防我们免疫系统中产生抗体的B细胞分泌杀死病毒的抗体。谁知道艾滋病病毒这么聪明呢？

Lead scientist Professor Jonathan Heeney, from Cambridge University, said: “For a vaccine to work, its effects need to be long-lasting. It isn’t practical to require people to come back every six to 12 months to be vaccinated.

来自剑桥大学的首席科学家乔纳森•海妮教授说道：“想要疫苗发挥作用，那它就得有持久性的效果。要求人们每6至12个月回来再次注射疫苗是不现实的。”

“We wanted to develop a vaccine to overcome this block and generate these long-lived antibody-producing cells. We have now found a way to do this. What we have found is a way to greatly improve B-cell responses to an HIV vaccine. We hope our discovery will unlock the paralysis in the field of HIV vaccine research and enable us to move forward.”

“我们想要开发一种能够克服该障碍的疫苗，这种疫苗能够分泌长久存在的产生抗体的细胞。现在我们已经找到了一个方法，能够大大提高B细胞对HIV疫苗的应答速度。我们希望此次发现能够打开HIV疫苗研究的新领域，使得我们能够继续向前。”

The researchers compared their achievement, reported in the Journal of Virology. So far results in lab experiments have been good. The new Cambridge approach produced the desired immune system responses and they lasted more than a year.

研究人员将他们的成果进行了对比，该研究发表在《病毒学杂志》上。至今为止，实验室中的实验结果都令人满意。新的剑桥方法产生了令人满意的免疫系统反应，而且时间超过一年。

In future, it should be possible to manufacture vaccines which stimulate long-lasting B-cell responses against HIV, the scientists believe.

科学家认为，将来有可能能够开发出刺激针对HIV的长时间B细胞反应。