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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Utilizing cytotoxic lymphocytes for indirect shock-and-kill strategy in HIV-1 treatment

Furtado Milão, Joana FIlipa January 2021 (has links)
Despite the existence of a treatment, there is still not a cure for HIV-1 infection and there arearound 700 000 deaths per year from AIDS-related diseases. A major barrier for a cure is theestablishment of latent reservoirs that are impossible to distinguish from healthy cells and thuscan escape the immune system. One potential solution is called shock-and-kill strategy, whichaims to induce HIV-1 reactivation, exposing latently infected cells to the immune system andmaking them susceptible to cell death. In our lab, it was seen that when NK cells are stimulatedwith a pan-caspase inhibitor, they acquire the “shock” ability, but it is still unknown how. Inthis project, we observed that the supernatant from pan-caspase inhibitor-stimulated NK cellscan increase HIV-1 reactivation in two different latency models. Furthermore, the protein levelsof three HIV-1 suppressors were found to be increased in the same supernatant. For this reason,their effect in HIV-1 reactivation in latently infected cells was analysed. Although we did notobserve an increase in HIV-1 reactivation, the upregulation of these three proteins can be usefulin the clinical context. Since they are HIV-1 suppressors, their presence can prevent theinfection from spreading after latent cells are reactivated. Altogether, our results show that NKcells stimulated with a pan-caspase inhibitor are secreting a biological product that inducesHIV-1 reactivation. This indicates that there is a pathway in NK cells that can potentially beexploited in order for them to be able to induce HIV-1 reactivation.

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