Majority of people will acquire HHV-6 for a short period in early childhood. HHV-6 is a distant relative to herpes simplex virus, but Herpesvirus 6 has entirely different effects. HHV-6 infections can lead to three-day fever disease in young children and infants, HHV-6 stays within the body later and is never eliminated. Herpesvirus 6 will not affect the health of most people, but it is thought to contribute to autoimmune diseases and chronic fatigue syndrome. Patients with compromised immune systems have great difficulty keeping HHV-6 under control which can cause serious damage to multiple organs.
Researchers set out to identify components of HHV-6 which could serve as targets for CD8-positive killer T cells, which are ruthless cells capable of going on the attack to bind and destroy infected cells, preventing virus multiplication within the body. Scanned the pathogen was done with help of an algorithm that identified close to 300 potential attack sites, additional analysis cut the findings down to 77 sites. T cells were successfully produced and directed against 20, 16 of which latched onto their target going in for the kill and destroyed the infected cell.
Very dissimilar proteins of the virus were shown to be attack structures. Killer T cells directed against those structures were observed to commonly occur in healthy individuals as well as patients with compromised immune systems unable to control infection. The team is currently working to verify findings in a large group of patients, wanting to apply findings to new treatments, but say there still is much work to be done before that can happen.
