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The Landmark Finding Will Guide Future Drug Design
In a long-awaited finding, a team of Chinese and US
scientists has determined the high-resolution atomic structure of a
cell-surface receptor that most strains of HIV use to get into human immune
cells. The researchers also showed where maraviroc, an HIV drug, attaches to
cells and blocks HIV’s entry.
“These structural details should help us understand more
precisely how HIV infects cells, and how we can do better at blocking that
process with next-generation drugs,” said Beili Wu, PhD, professor at the
Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM), Chinese Academy of Sciences. Wu
was the senior investigator for the study, which was published in Science
Express on September 12, 2013.