It's as if a land mine were hiding directly on top of an Army mine sweeper. Scientists have long pondered the irony of HIV's ability to hide out inside macrophages--cells whose job it is to kill foreign cells. Baek Kim, professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, has been pondering this situation for the past 15 years. And, together with Emory scientist Raymond Schinazi, he might have found a way to turn HIV's trickery into a weakness to be exploited.
Drug Discovery & Development reports on Kim and Schinazi's research, which appeared in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. They discovered that normally, HIV uses deoxynucleoside triphosphate (dNTP) when it wants to replicate itself within cells. However, dNTP is largely absent inside machrophages. So, when its inside a macrophage, the HIV improvises a bit and uses a related molecule called ribonucleoside triphosphate (rNTP) to make copies of itself.
"The virus just wants to finish replicating, and it will utilize any resource it can to do so," Kim told Drug Discovery & Development. So, when the researchers blocked the AIDS virus' ability to interact with rNTP, HIV was unable to replicate 90 percent of the time. This research opens up a new front in the war on HIV by presenting the possibility of attacking them inside macrophages, where the virus remains out of reach of most of today's drugs.
- read the report in Drug Discovery & Development