Cats Could Be The Key To Successful Human HIV Vaccine

Dogs may be man's best friend, but it looks like cats could save millions of people! Researchers discovered that cats could be the key to a successful human HIV vaccine. Pretty wild! To find out just HOW cats could be the key, keep on reading!

Both HIV and AIDS don't have a cure. Previous attempts at creating an immunization of each have failed. There may however be a key in FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus), which is the cat version of human HIV.

From Inquisitr:

Janet Yamamoto, a professor of retroviral immunology, explains the reasons for using cats in developing a human HIV vaccine to Medical News Today:

“Since FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus) and HIV-1 are distant cousins and their sequences are similar, we used the T cells from HIV positive human subjects to see if they can react and induce anti-HIV activity to small regions of FIV protein, which lead to the current story.”

Professor Yamamoto continues:

“In humans, some peptides stimulate immune responses, which either enhance HIV infection or have no effect at all, while others may have anti-HIV activities that are lost when the virus changes or mutates to avoid such immunity. So, we are looking for those viral peptides in the cat AIDS virus that can induce anti-HIV T-cell activities and do not mutate.”

So, basically the researchers think that using cats to identify certain peptides that produce human T-cells to fight off HIV could lead to an HIV immunization!

The internet already has an uncomfortably forward love for felines...this could just make it worse (better)!