A prominent problem in AIDS is a form of dementia that robs one’s ability to concentrate and perform normal movements. Scientists at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) have discovered how HIV/AIDS disrupts the normal replication of stem cells in the adult brain, preventing new nerve cells from forming.
The Burnham team focused on the determining the effect of a protein associated with AIDS, called HIV/gp120, which plays a key role in the pathogenesis of AIDS dementia.
In initial work with cell cultures in Petri dishes, the researchers methodically ruled out the possibility that HIV/gp120 would be inducing the death of stem cells and determined instead that HIV/gp120 was acting by inhibiting stem cell proliferation. Next, they confirmed these results in a special mouse strain bred to express HIV/gp120 in its brain.
This mouse model for AIDS dementia mimics several features of the disease process found in humans. They observed a significant decrease in the number of proliferating stem cells in the brains of HIV/gp120-mice compared with similar tissue from normal, wild-type mice.read more
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