Scientists Close in on Mouse Model for HIV

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For more than a decade, scientists have been trying to develop a mouse that could be infected with HIV so that the disease could be studied in an animal that is readily available and reproduces quickly.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For more than a decade, scientists have been trying to develop a mouse that could be infected with HIV so that the disease could be studied in an animal that is readily available and reproduces quickly.In a step that brings researchers closer to that goal, scientists have shown that mouse cells can be modified to allow the virus to penetrate and reproduce in them, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Cell Biology.An AIDS researcher unaffiliated with the new study said that while the research may not immediately yield a mouse that can be used to study HIV, it identifies a crucial step in the process.”From the beginning, people have been looking for a mouse model,” said Dr. James Hoxie, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and director of the Penn Center for AIDS Research, both in Philadelphia.”So far, the only model available has been non-human primates. And they are expensive and increasingly hard to get,” Hoxie said in an interview with Reuters Health.A mouse model would “be a boon to many areas of HIV research, especially vaccine research” Hoxie said.In earlier studies, researchers found that cells from mice modified to carry human receptors for the virus could be infected with HIV, Hoxie explained. But the virus was not able to reproduce in those mouse cells. That’s because the virus-infected mouse cells weren’t able to produce an important building block needed to make new viral particles, Hoxie said.For the new study, Dr. B. Matija Peterlin and colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco tweaked mouse cells to carry not only the human receptors that allowed infection, but also two key proteins, CycT1 and hp32, that appear to support replication of the virus.After infecting these mouse cells with HIV, the researchers were able to show that the cells produced both the building blocks for the virus and new viral particles.”This is an interesting and promising model,” Hoxie said. “But just because it works in mouse cells, doesn’t mean it will work in a mouse. This is an exquisitely regulated system. You need just the right amount of (hp32). Too much could be just as bad as too little.”(Source: Reuters, Mon June 30, 2003 05:37 PM ET, By Linda Carroll)