Once the HIV enters the body, the immune system starts to produce antibodies to fight the pathogen. Generally, the antibodies produced are specific to the particular strain of HIV.
However, research reveals that around 1 percent of HIV-infected people produce broadly neutralizing antibodies that attack different strains of HIV that circulate worldwide.
Broadly neutralizing antibodies bind to structures or "spikes" on the surface of the virus that arise from the virus itself and vary little among different strains.
Much of the search for an HIV vaccine focuses on better understanding how broadly neutralizing antibodies form and attach to the spikes.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers from the University of Zurich and University Hospital Zurich (UZH) in Switzerland describe how they found disease-specific, host-specific, and virus-specific factors that appear to influence the body's ability to make broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV.
For the study, the team examined around 4,500 people infected with HIV - all participants of the Swiss HIV Cohort Study and the Zurich Primary HIV Infection Study. They found 239 of the participants formed broadly neutralizing antibodies.