Another chemokine strategy

As reported in last week's Technology Briefing, chemokine research has become a hot area since the discovery of chemokine receptors as co-factors in HIV infection. However, a shortcoming of using chemokines themselves as drugs is their short half-life of less than 10 minutes.

Researchers at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, N.C.) have found a way around that dilemma through the development of chemokines, called intrakines, that are modified to remain intracellular instead of being secreted, and block the surface expression of the CCR-5 HIV co-receptor. The work was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...