The study, published in the journal Science last week, is just the latest chapter in a detective story that started six years ago, when an Australian Red Cross worker identified a pair of transfusion recipients who’d been infected by the same blood donor years earlier but hadn’t suffered any symptoms. In a 1992 report, researchers described seven such patients and concluded they shared a “nonpathogenic strain” of HIV. Now a.separate team has identified specific abnormalities in HIV taken from the donor and five of the patients (now infected up to 14 years). The virus they share lacks portions of"nef," one of HIV’s nine genes.
The finding won’t affect clinical practice any time soon, but it could change the course of AIDS research. For one thing, it suggests that nef would make a good target for future AIDS drugs. If a treatment could put nef out of commission, it might effectively declaw other varieties of HIV. The finding also raises new hopes for a preventive vaccine. If researchers knew HIV-minus-nef was truly harmless, they could give it to healthy people in the hope of triggering lifelong immunity. But because HIV mutates so rapidly within the body, even a benign strain could become deadly after it was administered. “We have not discovered a drug or a cure for HIV infection,” Dr. John Mills of Australia’s Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research said during a Melbourne press conference last week. “We have discovered a process to target.” As AIDS discoveries go, that’s not bad.
