Study helps explain how HIV becomes AIDS

Finding could help scientists seeking therapies to block virus progression

Source: University of California Irvine, Calif., July 31, 2007
A new UC Irvine study sheds light on how HIV develops into AIDS and suggests a possible way to block the deadly transformation.

UCI biologist Dominik Wodarz has shown for the first time that the development of AIDS might require HIV to evolve within a patient into a state where it spreads less efficiently from cell to cell. This counters the current belief that AIDS develops when the virus evolves over time to spread more efficiently within a patient, ultimately leading to the collapse of the immune system.

The study also finds that multiple HIV particles must team up to infect individual cells, called co-infection, in order for deadly strains to emerge and to turn the infection into AIDS. If just one virus particle infects a cell, the deadliest strains may not be able to evolve, stopping HIV from progressing to AIDS. By keeping more than one HIV particle from infecting a cell, scientists might be able to ward off AIDS, the study suggests. AIDS killed more than 17,000 people in the United States in 2005.

“If this is true, a new approach to therapy could be to block the process of co-infection in cells,” said Wodarz, who used a mathematical model to draw his conclusions. “This would prevent deadly HIV strains from emerging and the patient would remain healthy, despite carrying the virus.”

The study appears online July 31 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/l7237342p6683318/ (access to full-text restricted)

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