| A New Look at HIV -
13-01-2008, 07:19 PM
HIV: you’ve heard about it on the news, in magazines, on television and more. This life-threatening virus attacks the human immune system revealing now that it is a lot more complex then imagined. It was once thought that HIV only affected 36 human proteins, but recent research reveals as many as 273 proteins may be involved!
A new study out of Harvard Medical School reveals 273 human proteins are necessary for HIV production. Existing drugs directly treat the virus itself, making it simpler for the rapidly growing virus to avoid destruction by changing how it interacts with chemicals produced by the drugs. Now, researchers have quadrupled the list of known host factors to include proteins involved with a surprising array of cellular functions ranging from protein trafficking to a type of programmed cell death called autophagy.
“The virus would not be able to mutate to overcome drugs that interact with these proteins,” Stephen Elledge, Harvard Medical School professor and senior author, who holds primary appointments in the Department of Genetics and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was quoted saying. “Scientists can look at the list, predict why HIV needs a particular protein, and then test their hypothesis.” - Source: Science Express, published online Jan. 10, 2008
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