Monitoring how T cells respond to HIV
One of the obstacles to developing an effective AIDS vaccine is the difficulty in measuring how well a potential vaccine primes the body to defend itself against HIV.Ideally, scientists would like their vaccines to provoke T cells, a critical component of the immune response, to recognize and kill HIV-infected cells. Unfortunately, there is no fast and easy way to monitor whether T cells are actually doing that. Instead, researchers measure the amount of a protein called interferon gamma that T cells secrete when they encounter an infected cell. Studies have shown, however, that this “surrogate” measurement doesn’t necessarily predict a T cell’s ability to kill HIV-infected cells. In an advance that could overcome that obstacle, a team of researchers at MIT has developed a new technology that can measure multiple aspects of individual T cells’ responses to HIV-infected cells, including their ability to kill them. The technology could make it...