Main | Tuesday, March 10, 2015

A Live Look At Simian HIV

Via Science Magazine:
Show me the monkey. Seeing is believing, and a study in rhesus macaques with a new imaging technique reveals for the first time a real-time map of an AIDS virus replicating in the entire body of a living animal. The results point to some unexpected hideouts of the simian AIDS virus, or SIV. And the experiments also show that when the monkeys are given antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, the amount of virus that persists differs by location in the body. The innovative tool promises to clarify the still-murky details of the initial infection process and may help guide drug, vaccine, and cure research in people. “It’s fantastic,” says Thomas Hope, an immunologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, who investigates how HIV, the human counterpart to SIV, infects cells. “The whole monkey shows you things you can’t comprehend by just looking at cells or biopsies of tissues.”
Fascinating details are at the link.

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