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Study Says Chemical Found in Gut Key to HIV's Ability to Infect the Brain
"Previous research has suggested that it's not individual HIV viruses that get into the brain but rather HIV-infected immune cells known as monocytes," says Dr. Harris Goldstein, director of the Einstein-Montefiore Medical Center for AIDS Research, and senior author of the study published in the Journal of Virology.
"Using an animal model, we wanted to find out first of all whether being infected with HIV enables monocytes to do what they don't usually do - escape from blood vessels and enter brain tissue," the researcher added.
For their study, the researcher first created transgenic mice whose monocytes coded for green fluorescent protein (GFP), so that they would become easy to detect.
The group later injected HIV-infected GFP monocytes and the normal ones into control mice.
When the brains of the subjects were examines four days later, the researchers observed that there was no sign of monocytes in the brains of any of the mice injected with uninfected GFP monocytes.
However, monocytes were found to be present at very low levels in the brains of nearly one third of the mice injected with the HIV-producing monocytes.
"These results demonstrated very clearly that being infected with HIV somehow gives monocytes the capacity to cross an intact blood brain barrier (BBB). But we also suspected that something else was making it easier for HIV-infected monocytes to breach the defences protecting the brain from infection," says Dr. Goldstein.
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