UNSW and the tale of the Toshiba

Years back, when I was still a student and while I was still entranced and willing to spend months on end doing repetitive and monotonous benchwork for the thrill of the results, I was accepted to take part in an online research collaboration organized by the University of New South Wales. It was a Genomics international research project called Omnium. We were split up into groups, and mine was named the Merope Team. My groups project involved using the genomic tools made available to us through UNSW to study HIV Progressors compared to Slow and Non-Progressors based on GP-120 Structure. The idea was to utilize exceptional high quality genomic visualization tools and the expertise of young colleagues from universities around the world, to push forward and test out a new research frontier. The platform and results are probably still online somewhere. At that time I remember thinking that it was a wasted big pharm opportunity to not create vaccines based on the gp-120 region of the HIV virus. We spent a great deal of time working with visualizations of GP 120 and also GP 41. The regions with these two proteins are the most stable and slow to mutate areas of the HIV Virus. The HIV virus uses these proteins to bind to and infect healthy cells.

Today the journal Science published paper from a talented team out of Scripps in la Jolla who discovered two antibodies that bind to both GP 120 and GP 41 in 3/4 of HIV strains found. Interesting finding to come so many years after our initial project. maybe it's because we did it in affiliation with UNSW which is located on the island of Australia. an island. far away in far far away land. I hope more attention is paid to this discovery and that the WHO is able to devote more funding.