By Hillary Copsey, TCPalm.com
March 7, 2010
TRADITION — The scientific director of VGTI Florida and his collaborators are offering new insights in how HIV weakens the immune system in research published Sunday in the online edition of the scientific journal “Nature Medicine.”
The findings could lead to new therapies that rescue immune systems compromised by HIV, said Dr. Rafick-Pierre Sékaly, VGTI Florida scientific director.
Sékaly’s research, conducted with his colleagues at the University of Montreal along with scientists from the National Institutes for Health and McGill University Hospital, describes the ending act in a chain reaction that begins when the human immunodeficiency virus infects a person.
HIV triggers the gut to release bacteria, which prompt white blood cells to produce a protein called PD-1. Too much PD-1 triggers the production of another protein — IL-10 — and those two proteins, which are known to be present at high levels during HIV infection, work together to shut down disease-fighting T-cells and weaken the entire immune system.
The creation and interaction of these proteins begins to explain why some HIV-infected people have low viral loads but still have major problems in their immune system, Sékaly said.
“The bacteria, they are the ones that are going to do the damage,” Sékaly said. “It’s not HIV that does the damage.”
VGTI Florida is working to find partners to use the research as a jumping-off point to create drug therapies that limit the creation of the PD-1 and IL-10 proteins, Sékaly said. Within the year, the researcher hopes to find a partner to create drug therapies for this latest research as well as the work announced in June that showed reservoirs of HIV hiding in the immune system’s memory cells.
“We can do incredible research, but we’re not drug developers,” Sékaly said.
VGTI Florida, an expansion of the Oregon Health & Science University’s Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, is set to break ground this year on a $42 million facility at the Florida Center for Innovation in Tradition. Twenty-six scientists already are at the center, borrowing space at Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, and working on the HIV research as well as a study looking at how influenza affects the immune system.
Unlike its Oregon counterpart, VGTI Florida’s research is focused on human testing by taking samples from patients. Lured to Florida with a state and local incentives package worth more than $100 million, the institute plans to establish partnerships with other researchers and medical groups in the area and already is using samples taken from patients — with permission — at Martin Memorial Health Systems for its influenza study.
“We want to make this place very central to all research that involves the immune system,” Sékaly said.