Hijacked proteins that spread HIV identified

Fresh research has identified more than 270 proteins linked to the spread of HIV in humans, a discovery that scientists hope will help them develop new ways to combat the disease.

The study, undertaken by a team from Harvard Medical School and published in Science Express, discovered a wide range of proteins that had not been linked to the virus in previous trials.

As a result, the researchers hope that colleagues will now be able to examine various new hypotheses to help develop treatments and examine the factors behind HIV's resistance to existing anti-viral drugs.

"Anti-viral drugs are currently doing a good job of keeping people alive, but these therapeutics all suffer from the same problem, which is that you can get resistance, so we decided to take a different approach centred on the human proteins exploited by the virus," said the report's senior author Stephen Elledge.

"The virus would not be able to mutate to overcome drugs that interact with these proteins," he added.

Last month, researchers from the University of Missouri and Imperial College London identified the means by which HIV-infected cells evade the body's immune system, thereby making existing vaccines unsuccessful.

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