Aids mouse -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 12/6/2002
Last Visited: 9/7/2004
"From the beginning, people have been looking for a mouse model," said Dr. James Hoxie, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and director of the Penn Center for AIDS Research, both in Philadelphia.
"So far, the only model available has been non-human primates.And they are expensive and increasingly hard to get," Hoxie said in an interview with Reuters Health.
A mouse model would "be a boon to many areas of HIV research, especially vaccine research" Hoxie said.
In earlier studies, researchers found that cells from mice modified to carry human receptors for the virus could be infected with HIV, Hoxie explained.But the virus was not able to reproduce in those mouse cells.That's because the virus-infected mouse cells weren't able to produce an important building block needed to make new viral particles, Hoxie said.
...
"This is an interesting and promising model," Hoxie said.