HIV battle finds new way with engineered T cells

Pittsburgh, November 12: Millions of people battling with AIDS worldwide may see a ray of hope with specially engineered T cells.

Two teams of researchers from United states and the United Kingdom claim to have engineered T cells to identify and fight human immunodeficiency virus (HIVdefine) strains. HIV primarily invades the immune systemdefine making it vulnerable to other series of infections and diseases.

The team from University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and their British counterparts noted that the research is set to play an important role in treating HIV.

Researchers found that the T cell receptor arbitrates weak molecular interactions, helping the natural T cells to locate targets. They encoded genesdefine attached to HIV-1 by isolating a group of T cell receptors. The bond of the genes is almost 450 times more powerful.

Professor James Riley, a research associate, said, "Not only could T cells engineered to express the strongly binding T cell receptor see HIV strains that had escaped detection by natural T cells, but the engineered T cells responded in a much more vigorous fashion so that far fewer T cells were required to control infection."

Professor Andy Sewell, of Cardiff University and co-senior author of the study, commented, "In the face of our engineered assassin cells, the virus will either die or be forced to change its disguises again, weakening itself along the way. We'd prefer the first option, but I suspect we'll see the latter."

The study is published online in the journal 'Nature Medicine'. The British team of scientists collectively came from Britain's Wellcome Trust, Oxford University and Adaptimmune Ltd.

Adaptimmune, a British company, is supposedly in possession of all the rights to the T cell technology in this research.