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TEST

Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Treatment fails to beat HIV: T-Cells Research Explains why!

Ryan Zurakowski, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware, Mathias Lichterfeld, Ragon Institute of MGH, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University and researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), together have presented a paper titled as "HIV-1 Persistence in CD4+ T-Cells with Stem Cell-Like Properties," which throws light on how a particular T-cell type may provide a better understanding of how HIV can persist despite treatment. It has been explained that treatment does not kill the infected cells, but stop the infection of new cells. It is upon virus itself to kill the infected cells. However memory T-cells which have been infected by the virus do not get killed by virus.

T-cells are lymphocytes, which are produced by the thymus gland and they actively participates in the body's immune response. "Memory" T-cells can live for years, or even decades, providing life-long immunity to previously encountered diseases. They can form "dormant" infections, which last for years, and cause HIV to ricochet whenever a patient stops treatment.


Researchers discovered a subgroup of memory T-cells calles “Stem-Cell Memory T-cells" (Tscm), are different, particularly in their ability to produce daughter cells. These cells decayed more slowly than any other type of T-cells and if HIV infected, they could even persist after years of therapy. As a result, after 10 years of therapy, the Tscm cells represented 24 percent of the total HIV infected cell population, despite being only 1 percent of the total T-cell population. This is a significant finding as this slowest decaying portion of HIV infected cells play an increasingly significant role in sustaining HIV infection in patients that have remained on therapy according to Zurakowski.
Credit for this finding goes to to the diligence of Lichterfeld and the researchers at the Ragon Institute in cautiously following the same HIV patients for a decade that proved to be a source of a high fidelity data set for the Team of Zurakowski , that would not otherwise have been possible

Work is currently going on in developing Drugs for cancer therapy that target stem-cell metabolic pathways and  may be able to target this cell type as well, due to the "stem-cell like" nature of the Tscm cells. For developing better clinical strategies for HIV treatment, it is better to understand how the HIV virus leverages a cell's stem cell-like properties of cellular immune memory to stay alive.
Zurakowski concludes that if ways are developed to selectively eliminate the HIV-infected Tscm cells, it will be a major step in developing a true 'cure' for HIV infection.