AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, May 31, 2004
Staff Medical Writers

According to a study from the United States, "Highly HIV exposed, persistently uninfected individuals (EUs) may hold clues to the generation of effective vaccine induced acquired immunity against HIV, and considerable effort has been devoted to detecting and characterizing HIV specific immune responses in EU cohorts. When searching for such clues, it is important to exclude individuals with genetically determined absence of receptors, as this protective mechanism could not be induced by HIV-specific vaccines.

"Homozygosity for the DeltaC32 mutation of CCR5 prevents R5 HIV infection, independent of any virus-specific immune responses that may be acquired by exposure, while heterozygosity influences susceptibility to low level exposure," said Rohan John and colleagues at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center. "Reports on the in vitro susceptibility of EU cells compared to controls have been conflicting. Therefore, we studied 14 EUs with homozygous wild type CCR5, using a newly developed in vitro challenge assay (IVCA) to measure the magnitude and breadth of resistance to infection among EUs.

"CD8+ cells were relatively increased compared to controls, and were largely responsible for resistance to challenge, which depended on dose of virus inoculum, and extended across clades," reported the researchers. "Consistent with some EU cohort studies, resistance waned among individuals who reduced their high-risk behavior."

John and associates published the results of their research in JAIDS - Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (Risk associated HIV-1 cross-clade resistance of whole peripheral blood mononuclear cells from exposed uninfected individuals with wild-type CCR5. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2004 Jan 1;35(1):1-8.

For additional information, contact David H. Schwartz, Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 North Wolfe Street, Suite E5132, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA. E-mail: dschwart@jhsph.edu.

The publisher of the JAIDS - Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes can be contacted at: Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins, 530 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106-3621, USA.

The information in this article comes under the major subject areas of AIDS/HIV Genomics and Genetics, AIDS/HIV Pathogenesis, Immunology, and Virology.

This article was prepared by AIDS Weekly editors from staff and other reports.

Reference

John R, Arango-Jaramillo S, Finny GJ, et al., "Risk associated HIV-1 cross-clade resistance of whole peripheral blood mononuclear cells from exposed uninfected individuals with wild-type CCR5.", J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2004 Jan 1;35(1):1-8

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