MIT experts make considerable strides in this direction

Oct 15, 2011 10:32 GMT  ·  By
A new technology developed by MIT chemical engineers offers the first way to study how effectively individual T cells respond to HIV-infected cells
   A new technology developed by MIT chemical engineers offers the first way to study how effectively individual T cells respond to HIV-infected cells

Until now, scientists were having trouble developing an effective HIV vaccine because they did not know exactly how the immune system, and especially T cells, were responding to the infection. Now, a group of researchers makes considerable progress in revealing this critical aspect of the disease.

Like all vaccines, a compound destined to prevent HIV would act by priming the immune system to deal with the virus. However, if scientists did not know how T cells would activate and behave, they couldn't possibly have created an efficient drug.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have now eliminated some of the uncertainties related to how T cells work, by developing a tool that can keep track of several traits the immune system display, over a period of time.

With this innovative technology, researchers will now find it easier to keep track of progress or regress, in HIV/AIDS patients who are treated with a variety of established or experimental drugs. Designing new vaccines will also become faster and more efficient.

The MIT research team was led by the Latham Family Career Development associate professor of chemical engineering at the Institute, J. Christopher Love. Details of the work appear in a paper published in the October 3 online issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

“Now that we have a tool to look directly at a variety of different functional activities, you can go in and start to evaluate other markers that may be better predictors of killing,” the researcher explains.

“Those then become what you would want to monitor in vaccine trials,” adds Love, who holds an appointment as a member of the Ragon Institute at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), MIT and Harvard, and the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

“The appeal of this technology is that it can help us understand more about what’s going on in single cells. It helps us rethink what we understand about immunology and immune function,” comments Rush Medical College professor of immunology and microbiology, Alan Landay.

After this survey technique is adopted at a large scale, we may expect to see a sharp increase in the number of proposed HIV medication, as well as an increase in the number of clinical trials proposed for new, potential cures.

Even so, a final solution against AIDS may still be a few years in the future. Clinical trials usually take 3 to 5 years, and some of them can fail altogether. In any case, the MIT study gives new hope to the millions of people currently surviving thanks to antiretroviral drugs.