james, thanks for the comments. Regarding the UR-T-cell approach, you are right in general, but first one should note the context in which, I think, this therapy would make sense. After extensive triple-drug therapy there may be a few cells harboring non- or slowly-replicating virus (cf. Science articles last week). CD4+ counts are back up and now the issue is to find those still-infected cells and get rid of them for good (eradicate the virus). This is, in theory, where the CEGE approach would come in. I am not sure how they would design a clinical trial for that, sounds tough. Now, normal CD8+ cells could do that, in principle, but because of the several intrinsic technical barriers such as antigen expression and presentation, the varying HLA restrictions between different individuals, and the potential for viral escape by sequence variation or surface molecule alteration on infected cells one wants a "universal receptor' (e.g. CD4) on your killer T-cell; the UR is supposed to overcome the sequence variation limitation. A patent was recently issued on this approach and that document may contain a bit more detail. The basic approach was described in the journal Blood back in 1994.
Hope AGPH fans are not too bored with this,
PB |
