What Is the Basis for the Chronic Immune Activation Associated With Pathogenic AIDS-Virus Infections?
Mark Feinberg, Merck & Company, Inc., West Point, PA, USA Mark Feinberg, formerly at Emory University in Atlanta, has conducted extensive research on SIV-infected sooty mangabeys. These animals represent an important model because, like African Green Monkeys, they rarely suffer any adverse immunological or clinical consequences of SIV infection. Yet SIV isolated from sooty mangabeys, when transferred into rhesus macaques, causes simian AIDS within a relatively short period. Feinberg has previously described one key distinction between the species in terms of their response to SIV: macaques experience chronic immune activation (as evinced by increased expression of the activation marker CD38 on T cells and increased T cell turnover) while sooty mangabeys do not. In his talk, Feinberg described the efforts of his research group to understand this difference. The availability of microarrays allowed the investigators to analyze gene expression profiles of Mangabeys compared to humans and m
