Understanding how HIV evades the immune system
Monash University and Cardiff University (UK) researchers have come a step further in understanding how the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) evades the immune system.
Published today in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, the Monash-Cardiff team have made an important finding in understanding how HIV-I can evade the immune system.
They demonstrated, in molecular detail, how mutations within HIV can lead to differing ways in which key immune molecules, termed the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), display fragments of the virus and how this results in the HIV remaining “hidden” from the immune system.
Principal author of the study, Dr Julian Vivian, said the team was yet to develop a complete understanding of how HIV outmanoeuvred our immune system.
