NEURONS can protect themselves against infection from HIV. They owe their hardiness to a protein called FEZ-1, made uniquely by neurons, which appears to lock out the virus.
The hope now is to produce treatments to thwart HIV by using gene therapy or drugs to activate production of FEZ-1 in cells other than neurons, especially the white blood cells most vulnerable to infection by the virus.
“We know FEZ-1 blocks infection, but we need to find the basic mechanism,” says Mojgan Naghavi of University College Dublin in Ireland, head of the team reporting the breakthrough in Proceedings of the National…
