'Fight against HIV/AIDS should be intensified'

Delivering a keynote lecture in the concluding session of 32nd Annual Conference of Indian Immunology Society Zinkernagel said a vaccine to fight HIV/AIDS was yet to be developed and people should follow the preventive method.

Nobel laureate Rolf Zinkernagel on Sunday said that fight against HIV/AIDS should be intensified as millions of people were afflicted by the killer disease around the globe.

Talking to reporters here after delivering a keynote lecture in the concluding session of 32nd Annual Conference of Indian Immunology Society, which was organised by Department of Immunopathology, PGIMER, Zinkernagel said a vaccine to fight HIV/AIDS was yet to be developed and people should follow the preventive method.

He said though medical science had made lot of progress, it was yet to develop a vaccine against diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, Malaria and Hepatitis C.

Earlier, addressing the session, Zinkernagel, who won Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1996, spoke on the basic aspects of adaptive immune response and described the importance of pre-existing antibodies in development of protective immunity against many infectious diseases like viral infections or other intracellular organisms.

He specifically touched upon the protective immunity in newly born children carrying the pre-formed antibodies transferred from the mother to fetus before birth which forms the basis of future adaptive immune response that generates on exposure to some infectious agents.

Zinkernagel, who hails from Zurich in Switzerland, was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of how the immune system recognises virus-infected cells.

HT Image