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We're On Some Kind of HIV Ass-Kicking Roll This Week

Later today we'll have an interview up with part of the research team responsible for this week's big announcement that gamers battling a puzzle game called Foldit, which lets players collaborate/compete in the predicting of structure of protein molecules

Later today we'll have an interview up with part of the research team responsible for this week's big announcement that gamers battling a puzzle game called Foldit, which lets players collaborate/compete in the predicting of structure of protein molecules, have succeed in modeling a key enzyme within the AIDS virus. Notably, it's a specific structure that's repeatedly foiled scientists, and computers don't have quite the spatial reasoning sense needed that humans do—yet. It took the crew of gamers, a large pool from "all walks of life," just three weeks.

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Also this week, researchers at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University released a study identifying a crucial weakness in the HIV virus, what it uses to disarm the body's immune system.

One of HIV's dirtier tricks is in how it wears out that system. Basically, the virus overstimulates the body's first line of immune defense, kicking it into super-overdrive and tiring it out before it can effectively unleash its second line of defense, what's called the adaptive immune response. Basically, this is when the immune system learns to recognize its enemies and develop specific immune responses to them. It's how the body becomes immune to something.

"HIV is very sneaky," explains Dr Adriano Boasso, the first author of the study, in a press release. "It evades the host's defences by triggering overblown responses that damage the immune system. It's like revving your car in first gear for too long. Eventually the engine blows out. This may be one reason why developing a vaccine has proven so difficult. Most vaccines prime the adaptive response to recognise the invader, but it's hard for this to work if the virus triggers other mechanisms that weaken the adaptive response"

The key is cholesterol, the heart villain. Which doesn't mean anyone should be thinking that cutting back on cholesterol has anything to do with HIV, but the cholesterol found the HIV cells' membranes is what appears to be triggering the immune response. If it's removed from said membrane, it can't do its thing you should wind up with a healthy, unexausted immune response. Which should be a very big deal.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.