How can spam e-mail help fight HIV?

David Heckerman, one of the Microsoft team's leaders, is not only a computer scientist, he's also a physician. He realized that the same theory used to block spam could also be used to kill HIV. After all, spam and HIV work in similar ways. When HIV attacks an immune cell, it creates thousands of replicas of itself. These aren't exact replicas, though. Each one is a slight variation on the original, and each of these goes on to attack more and more cells, each time replicating into mutated versions of the virus.

This makes it difficult to design a vaccine to kill HIV. To create a vaccine, scientists include antibodies that look for specific strains of HIV. Subtle mutations of the virus not targeted by the vaccine may survive, much as the spam blocker allows junk e-mail to pass through when it doesn't see any flagged words.

The Microsoft researchers hope to apply their antispam algorithm to HIV to calculate each possible HIV mutation. If they succeed, they can then provide HIV vaccine researchers with this data, and vaccines can include antibodies designed to kill all -- not just some -- of the mutated viruses.

Read full article here: [link to health.howstuffworks.com]