Jan 2008 The parasitic AIDS virus must hijack an amazing 273 human proteins to properly infect its host, according to new American research that should revolutionize the way scientists will try to stop the disease.
The Harvard study lists all the human-generated substances HIV must use in its attack on the immune system and offers hundreds of potential new targets for drug therapies that could halt the virus.
Stephen Elledge, professor of genetics and the study's principal investigator, says the finding "will spur research into the (HIV) life cycle ... and that can lead to greater insight into potential drugs."
The study was published online yesterday and will appear in the Feb. 8 edition of the journal Science.
Current antiretroviral medications that keep the disease at bay attack the virus itself, as would any of the AIDS vaccines for which scientists are now searching.
But the Harvard study offers researchers and pharmaceutical companies a menu of potential drug targets that are produced by the human body and are separate from HIV, says Elledge.
"It's clearly a new direction for this field," says Bhagirath Singh, head of infection and immunity with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. "It will (define) the new way of thinking about how to prevent the infection of the virus and its transmission."
Elledge says the new strategy would circumvent one problem with existing drugs: HIV is notorious for its ability to mutate rapidly, rendering many drugs ineffective.
This problem is why people with HIV are given a cocktail of antiretroviral medications, in the hope the virus will not be able to change sufficiently to escape an onslaught of many drugs at once.
New medications could kill or halt the invading organism by targeting the human substances HIV commandeers to survive and spread – rather than the virus itself.
By finding drugs that would deny the virus even one of these proteins, scientists may be able to prevent the attack, Elledge says.
There may well be drugs in circulation that could be used to block the creation of proteins HIV needs, or to stop the virus from accessing them, Elledge says.
