Link found between feline AIDS and its deadly human counterpart

• The surprise finding may mean cats with feline immunodeficiency virus, also known as FIV or feline AIDS, could eventually be treated even more effectively using some form of the experimental human vaccine.
• Researcher Janet Yamamoto, a professor at UF's College of Veterinary Medicine, also theorizes that these emerging relationships between the two viruses could one day lead to a vaccine for human AIDS.
• FIV is a natural infection of domestic cats that results in an immunodeficiency syndrome resembling HIV infection in humans.
• Yamamoto holds the patent on the only approved vaccine available through veterinarians to protect cats against FIV.
• Her most recent studies have attempted to improve the efficacy of that vaccine by using strains of FIV found in cats in which the disease had not progressed for some reason over several years.
• "We found that whenever we tried using less virulent strains of virus, we were able to make a better vaccine."
• Yamamoto's team was also surprised to discover that a core protein found in HIV also effectively protects cats against FIV.
• Some compounds made from separate virus strains have been successfully used in vaccines against viruses from the same subfamily, such as smallpox in humans, which is made from cowpox virus, and human measles vaccines for canine distemper in puppies.
• "Therefore, protective vaccines based on cross-reactive regions of AIDS viruses can provide broad immunity, and may be useful against viruses that are currently evolving in a new host, such as HIV infection of humans," Yamamoto said.
• "This raises a potential whole new area for research in the field of vaccines that with the current approaches haven't yielded any success to date," said Landay, whose research team is working to develop novel immune strategies to treat HIV infection.