Matt Gethers/20.380 HIV Project/Meeting Notes/4.5.08 Design Pitch and Other Issues

=4.5.08 Design Pitch and Other Issues=

Agenda

 * 1) Refine the presentation.
 * 2) Decide if we want to pursue John's superinfection-protected white blood cell idea.
 * 3) Set up a time to talk to Jacquin Niles about all things red blood cell?
 * 4) Talk about the other parts of the project (modeling, in vitro, in vivo, IP, ...) so we all know what we're writing.
 * 5) Figure out how we want to compile everything once it's written.


 * Note: May want to schedule another meeting to discuss points 2 onwards.

Refining the Design Pitch
Design pitch script is here.

SIR White Blood Cells
Superinfection Resistant (SIR) cells could be another means of developing a viral trap except that the trap would necessarily utilize cells with a genome. That could be useful because you could further engineer cells to migrate to places in the body characterized by high viral count. SIR-mediated viral traps could migrate to wounds and possibly make the spread of HIV less likely.

"An HUT-78 cell clone (F12) chronically infected by a nonproducer HIV-1 variant (Federico et al., (1989) AIDS Res. Hum. Retroviruses 5, 385-396) is fully resistant to superinfection with HIV-1 or HIV-2. We demonstrate that, in spite of the down-regulation of CD4 receptors, superinfecting-HIV-1 and -HIV-2 cross the F12 plasma membrane (even in the presence of OKT4A monoclonal antibodies) but fail to complete retrotranscription." Taddeo

Key papers:


 * 1) Federico pmid=8409934
 * 2) Federico2 pmid=7474070
 * 3) Nethe pmid=16107223
 * 4) Taddeo pmid=8503167
 * 5) Wildum pmid=16873261

Potential road blocks - The idea of SIR cells has been around for some time, so it's likely there's some IP associated with it. I imagine most people would have tried to make the human body generally resistant to HIV infection (vaccine?) rather than trying to create viral traps, but who knows? Also not sure what the "fail rate" of superinfection is.