THE mechanism that HIV uses to gag the immune system could be turned against some very different foes: autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
HIV is a master of attack, silencing the T-cells that usually alert the immune system at the moment of invasion. But until now, little was known about how it did this.
Irun Cohen and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Harvard University reasoned that the mechanism for binding the virus to its target might also disable the T-cell’s alarm call.
If so, it could be used…
