Immune protein may stall HIV
By Nathan Seppa
People who don’t get AIDS despite harboring the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) for years are more likely than AIDS patients to also have plenty of perforin, a protein that is instrumental in killing infected cells, scientists report in the November Nature Immunology.
The AIDS virus works by hijacking immune cells called CD4 cells, which disrupts the immune system in most people. Other cells of the immune system, CD8 cells, usually fail to defend against the virus.