THURSDAY, May 29, 2003 (HealthDayNews) --
A naturally occurring protective gene mutation found in some people with HIV may help preserve the immune system by impairing the HIV virus, says a Mayo Clinic study.
Experiments with mice also suggest the presence or absence of this mutation in a gene called Vpr may play an important role in determining whether people with HIV develop full-blown AIDS.
If confirmed, the findings about this so-called "good guy" mutation could help scientists develop new Vpr-based treatments to reduce immune cell death when someone is infected with HIV. Being able to preserve immune cells (known as T-cells) would shore up a person's defenses against the many infections that eventually kill people with AIDS.
The study appears in the May 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
"For seven years our lab has been studying how HIV infection causes T-cells to die. We had come to suspect that the patients who live with the replicating virus -- who are referred to as long-term non-progressive HIV patients because they don't die from this normally fatal disease -- had abnormalities of the programmed death response," senior author Dr. Andrew Badley says in a news release.
"In this study we found that, in fact, they have a mutation on the Vpr gene that impairs the cell-killing mechanism of the HIV virus," Badley says.
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