Harmless virus may hold cure to HIV
Published: August 27, 2005
Scientists have found that a simple, harmless virus might hold the key to the more effective and efficient development of HIV and anti-viral drugs, claims a study published in the online version of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
UCI chemical biologists, Weiss and Allison Olszewski employed the virus, called bacteriophage, to learn how a HIV protein could respond to a new class of anti-viral molecules they have discovered. They found that the virus can model millions of different mutational variants of an HIV protein called Nef.
Knowing how the entire population of Nef variants responds to new drugs gives researchers greater ability to identify broad-spectrum, anti-HIV compounds.
“Viruses are clever about mutating to defeat the best efforts of chemists and biologists. By recruiting a harmless virus, we’re learning how HIV will respond to new classes of anti-viral drugs before these compounds are tested in the clinic, which is currently an expensive and time-consuming process,” said Weiss.
The researchers first created one such library by attaching the Nef protein onto the bacteriophage, which was then coaxed into synthesizing the millions of mutational variants of Nef. They then targeted this library, which they call an allelome, with a second library of small-molecule compounds in order to identify the specific compounds that could target the entire population of Nef mutational variants.
The results suggested that chemically simpler, more flexible compounds could better accommodate viral mutations.
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