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How the virus of the AIDS is caught some with the brain

One includes/understands better why the HIV can cause insanities: not only it damages the neurons but it also prevents their regeneration starting from the cells stocks. Perhaps also causes some in other neurodegenerative diseases, this mode of action could open therapeutic tracks.
A third of the patients reached of the AIDS is victims of a form of progressive insanity. Without it being included/understood why, virus (the HIV) seems to attack directly the neurons. But a second mode of action has been just discovered by Stuart Lipton and his colleagues of Burnham Institute for Medical Research (the University of California): the virus blocks the regeneration of the neurons starting from the cells stocks, thus preventing the repair of the damage which it itself caused.
Discovered recently, this neurogenesis takes place only in certain areas of the brain, of which the principal part of the hippocampus, called gyrus notched, a zone implied in the memory and the training. The brain can thus repair these cerebral structures partly.
The American team thinks of having located the weapon of the virus: a glycoprotein presents on its hull, gp120, already suspected by several former work to cause damage with the neurons. On cultures of cells, the team highlighted that the gp120 prevents the multiplication of the cells stocks. Under the eye of the researchers, these cells started to divide normally but very stopped at a certain stage. The cells stocks remained blocked in this state without never transforming itself into neurons.

To start again divisions
In one second phase, the team studied a stock of mice which produce themselves much gp120. In their brain, the quantity of cells stocks appeared much weaker than in normal mice. The accused protein is fixed on two receivers present on the cells stocks of the neurons, in the mouse as at the man. While pushing their investigations further, the researchers flushed out an enzyme, the p38 MAPK (mutagens-activated protein kinase), which one knows that it can block the division of the cells. Obviously, the presence of the gp120 involves an increased production of p38 MAPK.
This discovery constitutes a real therapeutic hope. Molecules reducing the effects of this enzyme already exist and were tested for other diseases. The team of Stuart Lipton could besides make take again the division of the cells stocks - under experimental conditions - by inhibiting the action of this p38 MAPK.
Other neurodegenerative affections, like the diseases of Alzheimer and Huntington, could be concerned well with this discovery. It is thought indeed that the regeneration of neurons by the cells stocks is also disturbed by these diseases.

In The Image-
The envelope of the HIV carries many molecules, of which, here in white, the glycoprotéine gp120, which would have several harmful effects on the cells of the host