Current HIV Research - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2006

Millions of individuals worldwide have been infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and developed the disease known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Untreated, the infection can lead to dissolution of both the immunological and central neurological systems. A fraction of the world population of HIV-infected individuals is receiving medications that diminish the peripheral viral burden, but it remai Read More

Early in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, it was recognized that there were many syndrome-defining illnesses involving the nervous system, including peripheral neuropathies and dementia, opportunistic infections of the central nervous system (CNS) such as cryptococcal and tubercular meningitis, and progressive multifocal leukencephalopathy (PML). Fast on the heels of the discovery of HIV-1 as the causative agent for Read More

There are many excellent reviews of HIV infection of the nervous system. However these all assume that the reader has a working knowledge of the structure and cellular architecture of the brain. It may be that specialised brain vocabulary represents an unwelcome hurdle for those scientists with expert knowledge of the effects of HIV in other cell systems and who wish to extend that interest to the brain. This review provides Read More

Nearly every aspect of blood-brain barrier (BBB) function is involved in or affected by HIV-1. The disruption of the BBB tends to be minimal and is not likely the mechanism by which infected immune cells and virus enter the brain. Instead, immune cells, virus and viral proteins likely activate brain endothelial cells and enable their own passage across the BBB by way of highly regulated processes such as diapedesis and adsor Read More

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV) infects macrophages and microglia in the CNS and frequently causes neurocognitive impairment. Although antiviral therapy generally reduces the viral load in the CNS and improves HIV-associated neurological dysfunction, most current antiviral drugs have poor CNS penetrance and cannot completely suppress viral replication. Furthermore, drug-resistance mutations can evolve i Read More

Mononuclear phagocytes (MP; bone marrow monocyte-derived macrophages, histiocytes, alveolar macrophages, Kupffer cells, perivascular macrophages, and microglia) function as sentry and surveillance cells by acting as debris scavengers, killers of microbial pathogens, and regulators of immune responses. Interestingly, these same cells are reservoirs and vehicles of dissemination for the human immunodeficiency viru Read More

Lenviviral diseases of animals have been recognized for over a century, long before HIV was recognized as the cause of AIDS. All lentiviruses cause neurological disease and productive virus replication in the CNS occurs exclusively in cells of macrophage lineage. The ability to molecularly engineer the inoculum virus, to sample the brain at many different time points from acute through terminal infection and to correlate in Read More

Infection with the human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) remain a persistent and even growing health problem worldwide. Besides its detrimental systemic effects on the immune system, HIV-1 seems to enter the brain very soon after peripheral infection and can induce severe and debilitating neurological problems that include behavioral abnormalities, motor dysfuncti Read More

The human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is a neurotrophic lentivirus that enters and infects the central nervous system (CNS) of adults and children, giving rise to the clinical syndromes of AIDS-dementia complex (ADC) in adults and HIV-1-associated progressive encephalopathy (PE) in pediatric patients. The clinical presentation and progression of neuroAIDS in the developing brain of children is distinct from that seen Read More

Non-nucleoside inhibitors of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (NNRTI) are an integral part of combination therapy comprising three classes of antiretroviral drugs for the management of HIV/AIDS. NNRTIs are chemically diverse compounds that bind to a common allosteric site of HIV-1 RT and noncompetitively inhibit DNA polymerization. Resistance to NNRTIs arises rapidly upon drug treatment and results from mutation of Read More

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a degenerative disease of the immune and central nervous systems, is an enormous world-wide health threat. No cure has been found, and research is aimed at developing chemotherapy against the causative agent, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Chemotherapy for AIDS has progressed steadily in the past decade. However, new, effective, and less toxic chemotherapeut Read More

Variability, both at the population (interhost) as well as at the individual (intrahost) level is a key property of HIV that stems mainly from the inherent infidelity of the reverse transcriptase enzyme that the virus uses to transcribe its RNA genome into DNA so that it may be integrated into the human genetic material and propagated along with it. The lack of proofreading mechanisms, high turnover of virions, and propensity for Read More

Highly active retroviral therapy (HAART) has been in widespread use in the United States since 1996. We sought to determine how the use of HAART influenced survival among patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and primary central nervous system (CNS) non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). We used the populationbased San Diego and Orange County cancer registry to identify 94 patients with both AIDS and Read More

There is a continued need to develop inexpensive and effective drugs specific for novel targets of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). The HIV-1 nucleocapsid p7 (NCp7) protein plays a critical role in early and late stages of the virus life cycle and possesses two highly conserved retroviral zinc fingers that are essential for its function. We have previously shown that zinc finger inhibitors (ZFI) based on the S-acyl 2- Read More