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AIDS slowly weakens the immune system and allows life-threatening infections and cancers to thrive. The team isolated six 43- and 44-amino acid proteins that inhibited cell-surface and total expression of an essential HIV receptor and blocked HIV infection in laboratory cell cultures.

Their findings appear in the online edition of the Journal of Virology.

The proteins were modeled after a protein from a papillomavirus that causes warts in cows. This bovine papillomavirus is related to the human papillomaviruses that cause cervical cancer and some head and neck cancers.

“We have constructed an entirely new class of proteins that inhibit HIV infection. These proteins do not occur in nature, so our findings suggest a radical new strategy to prevent AIDS,” says senior author Daniel DiMaio, deputy director of the Yale University Cancer Center, and Waldemar Von Zedtwitz, professor of genetics at Yale School of Medicine.

“If these proteins are found to be active in people, they may provide a way to prevent AIDS and its consequences, including cancer.”

Research on papillomaviruses began in the DiMaio laboratory almost 30 years ago, before the AIDS epidemic had emerged and the role of papillomaviruses in cancer was known.

“Of course, there are many hurdles to taking a laboratory finding like this into the clinic, but because these proteins dramatically inhibit HIV in cell culture, they should be evaluated further,” DiMaio explains.

Other authors are Richard A. Sutton, Elizabeth H. Scheideman, Sara A. Mariatt, Yanhua Xie, and Yani Hu, all of Yale.

The National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the American Cancer Society, the James Hudson Brown-Alexandrer Brown Coxe Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health supported the research. This work was also supported by a donation to Yale Cancer Center by Laurel Schwartz.

More news from Yale University: http://news.yale.edu/