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February 26, 2004
Monkeys' Immunity to AIDS
Researchers at the Dana-Farber Institute at Harvard have made a striking discovery concerning an innate immunity to HIV in monkeys. The researchers found that a certain protein (specifically, the TRIM5-alpha protein) found in monkeys' cells, in fact prevents HIV cells from shedding their capsids, the hard outer shells of the viruses, thus keeping them from releasing their genetic material into the host cells.
It's way too early to speculate too much about what possibilities this discovery might hold for treatment of human AIDS patients, but we would imagine that, if such an avenue of research were to prove fruitful, it would be in an analagous way to current protease inhibitor therapies which prevent the virus from reproducing. Still, it seems like it would be rather difficult to induce the production of similar proteins in human cells, so it might not lead to any new treatment modalities at all--at least not directly.
Okay, so there's really nothing all that funny about any of this, but you've got to admit it's really cool. Plus, we haven't had any monkey-related stories in a while, so we were about due. Plus, how cute is that little guy up top?
"Cell Protein Gives Monkeys Innate Immunity to HIV, Researchers Discover" (NYT)
Posted by matt at February 26, 2004 02:47 PM
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