Researches from the New York University Langone Medical Center have found a protein that stops the spread of HIV. This could slow the progression of the AIDS virus.
The research focused on a protein called SAMHD1. Recent studies have found that immune cells, called dendritic cells, containing the protein are resistant to infection by HIV. Since the discovery, scientists have sought to understand how SAMHD1 works to protect these cells, with hopes that science might find a way to synthetically apply that protection to other cells.
The researchers found that that when a virus, like HIV, infects a cell, it hijacks the cell’s molecular material to replicate. Once the virus replicates, the resulting DNA molecule contains all the genes of the virus and instructs the cell to make more virus. SAMHD1 enters the cell and then nothing happens. It has nothing to build and replicate with and no DNA is made.
Since AIDS emerged in 1981 25 million have died from this infectious disease. There are now currently 1.8 million people that die each year from AIDS still. This new research may be able to put an end to these grim statistics.
This study appears online at Nature Immunology.