The fight against HIV/AIDS got a fillip with the news that the U.S. Researchers have identified 273 proteins which may be key to reproduction of the virus that causes AIDS. This opens up avenues for development of drugs which could disrupt the sophisticated
Life-cycle of the virus. The study was headed by Stephen Ell edge of Harvard Medical School.
HIV infection is mysterious as it has little genetic material of its own. When it infects a cell, it simply hijacks the cell’s genetic code to reproduce. It is in this context that the findings of this study are significant. It has identified some of the cell proteins the virus uses in that process.
Currently available anti-AID’s drugs focus on the virus itself. To that extent the effectiveness of these drugs could be impaired due to the fact that HIV being a highly mutable virus, it can change the target of the drug. This was the reason for him to focus on human proteins. Of the 273 proteins he had identified, only 36 were previously known.
The methodology used by Ell edge and his researchers was a technique by name ‘RNA Interference’ and this technique was honored with Nobel Prize a year ago. This technique could be effectively used to shut down one gene at a time within a cell. Then the researchers infected the cell with HIV to see if the virus could reproduce. This was repeated for 20000 proteins and 273 were identified.
The utility of the findings could be applied far beyond HIV/AIDS in that the same approach could be used to help find targets in the fight against other virus infections as well.