Making use of T cell discovery

The impact of a discovery described in Nature Medicine may not alter approaches to attacking HIV, but it may change the way in which therapeutics are evaluated. The findings - which showed that life expectancy of T cells is shortened in infected patients - could facilitate direct measurements of how HIV affects a patient, leading to new ways to measure the potential efficacy of candidate drugs as well as to personalized HIV therapies.

Researchers from the University of California (San Francisco) and colleagues took kinetic measurements of circulating T lymphocytes in both normal and HIV-infected patients and found that while T cell levels remained the same across the groups, the cells only lived one-third as long in infected patients...