快猫短视频

BY ATTACKING a target that should be common to virtually all strains of HIV,
the virus can be prevented from fusing with human cells, say a team of
researchers in Massachusetts.

The site they want to attack is a small pocket in an HIV surface protein
called gp41. This protein pops up when an HIV particle attaches to a white blood
cell. It punctures the cell membrane and briefly straddles the insides of the
virus and the cell, allowing fusion to take place.

Peter Kim and his colleagues at MIT鈥檚 Howard Hughes Medical Institute in
Boston have now produced a detailed picture of the small pocket that briefly
appears as gp41 pops up. In test-tube experiments, they found that blocking this
pocket with specially designed small peptide molecules impeded HIV鈥檚 ability to
infect cells (Cell, vol 99, p 103).

鈥淣ow we鈥檝e made an acceptable representation of the pocket, other people can
use this information to create drugs that bind to it,鈥� says Kim.

The nature of the experimental compounds that Kim鈥檚 team used to block the
site suggests that such drug molecules will be small enough to be taken orally.
Until now, proposed fusion-blocking drugs have involved large molecules,
which would need to be injected.

In addition, Kim鈥檚 research suggests that the gp41 pocket appears unchanged
in different HIV strains, so resistance against such drugs should be slow to
appear. This would make them a valuable addition to the arsenal of drugs
available against the virus.