Word: cd4
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Until recently, only one of these proteins was known--the immune cell receptor CD4...
Both strains initiate their entrance and corruption of the immune system via the same entrance--CD4 receptors. CD4 is a protein located on the cellular membrane of T cells (disease fighting white blood cells which identify invaders...
...took Ho only a few weeks to figure out why soluble CD4 didn't work. The early tests on the treatment were done on weak strains of virus grown in the lab. Somehow wild viruses could tell which CD4 molecules were decoys. Ho and the rest of the AIDS scientists had just learned a valuable lesson. They would have to test all their potential treatments on viruses that infected real patients...
...taken a junior faculty position at UCLA and moved his family back to California. He contacted Dr. Robert Schooley of the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver, and together they embarked on a clinical trial of soluble CD4 in two dozen patients, many of them in the later stages of AIDS. Unfortunately, Ho and Schooley wound up proving that soluble CD4 doesn't work. In the process, however, they discovered something very interesting--that there were tens of thousands of infectious viral particles in their patients' bodies, a lot more than anyone had expected...
...experience with soluble CD4 showed Ho that there were significant gaps in science's understanding of the life cycle of HIV. He decided to revisit his earlier Boston work on the first stages of infection. By hanging out in hospital emergency rooms and talking to colleagues, he and his team at UCLA identified four young homosexual men suffering from the flu-like symptoms of a primary HIV infection. Ho used a newly available tool of genetic engineering--the PCR test used most famously in the O.J. Simpson trial--to measure the amount of virus in the blood. Once again...