A recent study suggests that cats may hold the key to a HIV vaccine. The researchers of this study from the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Florida discovered that blood from HIV patients showed an immune response against feline AIDS protein.

The researchers included Janet Yamamoto, a retroviral immunology professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Florida. Yamamoto said, “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.”

The researchers will develop an HIV vaccine that can active a T cell immune response in patients against FIV (Feline immunodeficiency virus). T cells or T peptides are protein cells that are crucial to a viral reaction, since they trigger the body to distinguish viral peptides and attack them.

However, Yamamoto noted that not all HIV peptides can work as vaccine components. Cats may be the key to the vaccine after researchers found that peptides in FIV were found to trigger T cells to attack HIV.

“We had difficulty in identifying ways to select regions on HIV-1 for HIV-1 vaccine. Our work shows how to select the viral regions for HIV-1 vaccine. The regions on FIV or their counterpart on HIV-1 that have anti-HIV T cell activities can be used as a component for human HIV-1 vaccine,” said Yamamoto.