CRISPR and HIV: New Technique in Human Blood Unveils Potential Paths Toward Cure
upstart writes:
The HIV epidemic has been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic but represents a critical and ongoing threat to human health with an estimated 1.5 million new infections in the last year alone.
Drug developers and research teams have been searching for cures and new treatment modalities for HIV for over 40 years but are limited by their understanding of how the virus establishes infection in the human body. How does this small, unassuming virus with only 12 proteins -- and a genome only a third of the size of SARS-CoV-2 -- hijack the body's cells to replicate and spread across systems?
A cross-disciplinary team at Northwestern sought to answer that very question.
In the team's new study, published today (April 1) in the journal Nature Communications, scientists used a new CRISPR gene-editing approach to identify human genes that were important for HIV infection in the blood, finding 86 genes that may play a role in the way HIV replicates and causes disease, including over 40 that have never been looked at in the context of HIV infection.
[...] In the study, T cells -- the major cell type targeted by HIV -- were isolated from donated human blood, and hundreds of genes were knocked out using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. The "knock-out" cells were then infected with HIV and analyzed. Cells that lost a gene important for viral replication showed decreased infection, while cells that lost an antiviral factor showed an increase in infection.
From there, the team validated the identified factors by selectively knocking them out in new donors, where they found a nearly even break of newly discovered pathways and well-researched ones.
Journal Reference:
Hiatt, Joseph, Hultquist, Judd F., McGregor, Michael J., et al. A functional map of HIV-host interactions in primary human T cells [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29346-w)
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