BETHESDA, MARYLAND - Nobel Laureate David Baltimore Price challenged a fundamental principle of research AIDS: a type of immune cell is regularly able to seek and destroy cells infected with HIV. Speaking yesterday at the Ninth Annual Conference on progress in the development of vaccines against AIDS, Baltimore, virologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the head of a National Institutes of vaccine advisory committee health against AIDS, suggested that HIV effectively disarm the immune cells, white blood cells called cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL). The findings may shed light on why some experimental vaccines work in monkeys.
A crucial problem in the vaccine work against AIDS is to determine which immune responses to a vaccine must stimulate. Many researchers focused on antibodies, which GLOM the virus in the blood and help mount a successful infection. Much attention was also paid to CTL, who is like smart bombs, target and destroy cells that HIV has already infected. But the laboratory Baltimore has cast doubt on CTL can do the job themselves
Baltimore and Kathleen Collins MIT CTL guru Bruce Walker of Massachusetts General Hospital, started with two deceptively simple questions :. CTL can actually kill cells infected with HIV? Or to the target cells, such as those infected with cytomegalovirus and other pathogens, produce a factor that protects against CTL? To answer these questions, researchers have developed a test to gauge whether HIV interferes with the production of CTLs. For the immune system to produce CTL against specific pathogens, an infected cell must hold pieces of the pathogen on its surface, spreading what the enemy looks like. The Baltimore team found, however, that an HIV protein called NEF prevents infected cells display fragments of HIV to the CTL-part of the immune system, essentially blindfolding it.
"It seems very interesting," said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the meeting of the sponsor. "We need to take a step further and see up where you can push it. " Baltimore emphasizes that it is impossible to extrapolate from test-tube results to people. But he said the study may help explain why apes and humans infected with HIV that lack NEF gene appear to be unharmed by the virus: Maybe the infected cells stimulate the production of anti-HIV CTL antibody which butterfly infection early on.
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