London, Scientists have discovered that there is a type of <keyword id="57072" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Brain-Cell">brain cell</keyword> that can track how far we have travelled and remember where things are, which are added to our <keyword id="8815269" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="memory-map">memory map</keyword> of the places we have been. The existence of GPS-like brain cells, which can store maps of the places we've been, like our kitchen or holiday destination, was already widely known, but this discovery shows there is also a type of brain cell sensitive to the distance and direction of objects that can store their locations on these maps. The findings, detailing these cells called <keyword id="10477094" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="vector-trace-cells">vector trace cells</keyword> (VTC), were published in the journal <keyword id="1647146" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Nature-Neuroscience">Nature Neuroscience</keyword>. "The discovery of vector trace cells is particularly important as the area of the brain they are found in is one of the first to be attacked by brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, which could explain why a common symptom and key early 'warning sign' is the losing or misplacement of objects," said lead researcher Steven Poulter from Durham University in Britain. According to <keyword id="10477093" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="colin-lever">Colin Lever</keyword> from Durham University, these cells appear to connect to creative brain networks which help us to plan our actions and imagine complex scenarios in our mind's eye. "Vector trace cells acting together likely allow us to recreate the spatial relationships between ourselves and objects, and between the objects in a scene, even when those objects are not directly visible to us," Lever said. SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/stock-market/news/top-stocks-to-watch-spicejet-interglobe-aviation-tata-motors-pfizer-asian-paints-niit-lupin-and-others/articleshow/79849749.cms">Top stocks to watch – SpiceJet, InterGlobe Aviation, Tata Motors, Pfizer, Asian Paints, NIIT, Lupin, and others</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/stock-market/news/how-to-check-mrs-bectors-food-specialities-ipo-allotment-status-online/articleshow/79808672.cms?upcache=2">Mrs Bectors Food Specialities IPO allotment today: Here’s how to check share allotment status</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/startups/news/google-microsoft-invest-in-dailyhunt-for-its-short-video-platform-josh-making-it-the-latest-unicorn-in-india/articleshow/79850804.cms">Google, Microsoft invest in DailyHunt for its short video platform Josh – making it the latest unicorn in India</a>

Scientists discover GPS-like brain cells that can boost our memory map and help track distance discovered

<ul class="summary-list"><li><keyword id="4912868" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="moderna">Moderna</keyword>'s <keyword id="2667287" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="mRNA">mRNA</keyword> tech could change the game in the decades-long effort to develop an HIV vaccine.</li><li>The company said it expects to begin two vaccine trials in humans by the end of 2021.</li><li>While "excited" by the prospect, HIV researchers caution there's a long road ahead for mRNA vaccines.</li></ul>Moderna's investor presentation on Wednesday showcased the Massachusetts-based <keyword id="45082" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="biotech">biotech</keyword>'s efforts to develop vaccines against HIV and <a href="https://investors.modernatx.com/static-files/2a60b8d1-1210-4596-b51c-a57b3cba1c8f">eight</a> other <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/modernas-5-biggest-vaccine-programs-after-covid-19-2021-4">infectious diseases.</a>The company's mRNA technology, which has built upon <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mrna-vaccine-pfizer-moderna-coronavirus-2020-12">decades of research</a>, will now contribute to the long frustrated effort to contain the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.Working in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, Scripps Research, the Gates Foundation, and other partners, Moderna said it would begin testing two HIV vaccine candidates in humans by the end of 2021.The COVID-19 vaccine developer's long-term goal is to show that its mRNA-based vaccine can produce <a href="https://www.avac.org/blog/rise-broadly-neutralizing-antibodies">broadly neutralizing antibodies</a>, a type of immune response that researchers believe will be protective against circulating HIV strains around the world."Think about the people who die of HIV every year, the people who aren't alive because they don't have the amazing therapy available in this country," CEO Stephane Bancel told Insider <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/moderna-developing-covid-19-flu-rsv-combo-vaccine-2021-4">in an interview Tuesday</a>. In <a href="https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/global-statistics">2019</a>, 700,000 people died of AIDS-related causes, the disease caused by HIV, and an estimated 1.7 million individuals contracted HIV.However, two veteran HIV/AIDS researchers told Insider that while they're excited by the prospect of using mRNA technology to develop an HIV vaccine, there's a long road ahead for all players involved. Moderna's mRNA technology will indisputably speed up the "fine-tuning" of HIV vaccine development, but only continued testing will show if the end result is actually safe and effective. Emory University virology professor Rafick-Pierre Sekaly, who has studied HIV for two decades, said it would be "crazy not to test" whether mRNA technology could bypass the expensive, slow process of generating these protein fragments in the lab."We had such a spectacular outcome with <keyword id="1754604" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="coronavirus">coronavirus</keyword> that we absolutely need to embark on this platform and test it," Sekaly said. "None of the other [HIV] platforms have generated any inkling of promising results." Read more: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/modernas-5-biggest-vaccine-programs-after-covid-19-2021-4">Moderna is betting its mRNA technology will lead to a new wave of vaccines for diseases like HIV. Here are the top 5 it's working on beyond COVID-19.</a><h2>Moderna's partnership will build on a new and unproven vaccine approach </h2>William Schief, an immunology professor at Scripps Research and vaccine design director of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, presented Moderna's investors with unpublished data from an HIV vaccine trial presented at a <a href="https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2021/20210203-hiv-vaccine.html">virtual AIDS research conference</a> in February.The trial, which started in 2018, was conducted with 48 HIV-negative adults, and will serve as preliminary basis off which Moderna and its collaborators will further study and test a vaccine approach targeting broadly neutralizing antibodies. Subjects were given either a low or high dose of the <a href="https://www.iavi.org/news-resources/press-releases/2018/iavi-announces-clinical-trial-of-next-generation-hiv-vaccine-candidate-designed-to-induce-antibodies-to-block-hiv-infection">protein-based vaccine candidate</a>, which was designed to activate certain "naive" B cells of the immune system. When activated, the B cells produce proteins that eventually give rise to the hoped-for broadly neutralizing antibodies."The importance of priming these naive B cells is the key first step," Schief said on the investor call. "If you can't get that to work, the whole thing isn't going to work."After being treated with the experimental vaccine, 47 out of 48 participants showed the targeted levels of naive B cells critical in eventually producing the antibodies, though the data remains subject to peer review. The final study volunteer dropped out. Moderna's cost and time-efficient mRNA technology will speed up the process of conducting clinical trials, Schief said. Relatively speaking, conventional in-lab protein manufacturing is slow and expensive. "It took us years just to do that one trial, many years," he added, referring to 48-person study. "We need to do a lot of human clinical trials, and we think that Moderna mRNA is the technology that will let us do that."Moderna plans to test two mRNA-delivered HIV vaccine candidates in humans, both of which will test for safety and efficacy. The first is based on the initial study's protein component, while the other will determine whether synthetic HIV-like antigens can provoke the desired immune response. Both trials will start by the end of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/modernas-5-biggest-vaccine-programs-after-covid-19-2021-4">this year</a>. <div type="image" title="Stephane Bancel" height="3179" width="4239" msid="82150635" hostid="261"></div><h2>Compared to the virus behind COVID-19, HIV is a 'very different ballgame'</h2>Dr. Ian Frank, an HIV vaccine researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who's helped develop HIV vaccines including one that made it to <a href="https://www.aidsmap.com/news/sep-2007/merck-hiv-vaccine-fails-trials-halted">late-stage trials in 2007,</a> said that the mRNA approach to developing an HIV vaccine has the advantage of speed and flexibility. Without scrutinizing the data from Schief's study, which is still undergoing peer review, it's a little difficult to understand the nuance, he said.However, if the data show the vaccine created broadly neutralizing antibodies, this approach would signal a complete paradigm shift for HIV vaccine research, Frank said.Despite the success of using mRNA to immunize against COVID-19, HIV is a "very different ballgame," Sekaly, the HIV researcher at Emory University, said. Once infected with HIV, the virus remains permanently active in a small number of cells in the body if left untreated, unlike the virus that causes COVID-19.This means that a successful HIV vaccine has to overcome a higher hurdle than any other vaccine in history, Frank said. It would need to prevent infection, or the immune response underlying it, entirely. Other vaccines, including both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccines, only prevent the development of an infection into illness. "For us to have an HIV vaccine that is effective in a way that will lead to prevention of infection, there's some fine tuning of this vaccine that is gonna need to happen," Frank said.Although "excited" by the prospect of the Moderna partnership in HIV vaccine trials, Sekaly stressed that the mRNA-based delivery approach is still unproven beyond COVID-19, and emphasized the need for patient safety in clinical trials. Both Frank and Sekaly said that the company's mRNA platform would likely enable any promising vaccine candidates to move from early to mid-stage clinical trials within a year - a much faster pace than vaccine development has historically gone. <h2>Moderna's mRNA candidates have breakthrough potential in the frustrating, costly search for an HIV vaccine</h2>Speaking to Insider, company CEO Bancel acknowledged the inherent challenge in developing a safe and effective HIV vaccine, a global health problem whose solution has eluded researchers for four decades.The last HIV vaccine candidate that had made it to late-stage studies in South Africa stopped in February 2020 after there was "<a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/another-hiv-vaccine-strategy-fails-large-scale-study">absolutely no evidence of efficacy</a>," its head researcher told <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="60" keywordseo="science">Science</keyword>. An earlier version of the vaccine used in the South African study had only shown 31% efficacy in a previous <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa0908492">trial in Thailand</a>. Before that, the last HIV vaccine to make it to a late-stage clinical trial <a href="https://www.aidsmap.com/news/sep-2007/merck-hiv-vaccine-fails-trials-halted">concluded in 2007</a>. The two remaining late stage clinical HIV vaccines trials, Mosaico and Imbokodo, are being run by Johnson &amp; Johnson and will not release results before the end of 2021.Like the South African study halted in 2020, both trials use an inactive viral vector carrying genetic material <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02319-8">based on HIV's many strains</a> from around the world, as well as a synthetic protein mimicking part of a particle's envelope protein.Even without Moderna involved, the HIV vaccine designed by Schief's team takes a different approach to tackling the virus than the one used in the J&amp;J trials. By using the same delivery method as both Moderna's and Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccines, researchers will be able to fine-tune versions of their vaccine even further, Frank said.<div type="image" title="AP21034450685389" height="2663" width="3550" msid="82150637" hostid="261"></div><h2>COVID-19 vaccines have benefited from decades of HIV vaccine research</h2>Although he finds the prospect of an mRNA vaccine exciting, Frank said Moderna and its partners have a long road ahead in proving if their mRNA-delivered protein approach is successful."The strategy has the potential to be a breakthrough, but it's the first step in a hard climb," Frank said. Moderna's mRNA technology will definitely give researchers the ability to test quickly, but that's all he can conclude. "I'm sure they can get a candidate vaccine," Frank said. "The challenge will be how effective of an immune response it elicits." The COVID-19 were been the breakthrough moment for mRNA vaccines, creating inroads for <a href="https://www.insider.com/vaccines-for-cancer-hiv-coming-thanks-to-covid-19-vaccine-2021-4">further HIV and cancer research</a>. However, according to a recent <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28587/w28587.pdf">National Bureau of Economic Research</a> paper, it was actually decades of collective failure and the billions of dollars poured into HIV vaccine research that laid the foundation for the COVID-19 vaccines.Published in March, author Jeffrey E. Harris found that 86% of clinical COVID-19 vaccines could trace their scientific basis to past HIV vaccine trials. From this vantage point, Moderna's mRNA platform is actually just a brief interlude from directly HIV-oriented scientific research driving the latest efforts in curbing the HIV/AIDS epidemic.Andrew Dunn contributed reporting.

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