Life Sciences Commons^™

A Hunter Virus That Targets Both Infected Cells And Hiv Free Virions: Implications For Therapy, Cody Greer, Gisela García-Ramos

Biology Faculty Publications

The design of 'hunter' viruses aimed at destroying human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infected cells is an active area of research that has produced promising results in vitro. Hunters are designed to target exposed viral envelope proteins in the membranes of infected cells, but there is evidence that the hunter may also target envelope proteins of free HIV, inducing virus-virus fusion. In order to predict the effects of this fusion on therapy outcomes and determine whether fusion ability is advantageous for hunter virus design, we have constructed a model to account for the possibility of hunter-HIV fusion. The study was based …

Nef Functions In Blt Mice To Enhance Hiv-1 Replication And Deplete Cd4+Cd8+ Thymocytes, Wei Zou, Paul W. Denton, Richard L. Watkins, John F. Krisko, Tomonori Nochi, John L. Foster, J. Victor Garcia

Biology Faculty Publications

Background: The outcome of untreated HIV-1 infection is progression to AIDS and death in nearly all cases. Some important exceptions are the small number of patients infected with HIV-1 deleted for the accessory gene, nef. With these infections, disease progression is entirely suppressed or greatly delayed. Whether Nef is critical for high levels of replication or is directly cytotoxic remains controversial. The major problem in determining the role of Nef in HIV/AIDS has been the lack of tractable in vivo models where Nef’s complex pathogenic phenotype can be recapitulated.

Results: Intravenous inoculation (3000 to 600,000 TCIU) of BLT …