University of Pittsburgh -- PITTSBURGH, March 25, 2010 – Like a skittish driver slamming the brakes, a special class of T cells may be limiting the effectiveness of therapeutic vaccines for HIV by slowing the immune system response too soon, report University of Pittsburgh health science researchers in the current issue of PLoS ONE. Their study, the first to look at the role of regulatory T cells in therapeutic HIV vaccines, may help researchers improve the efficacy of such vaccines by devising methods to circumvent the braking mechanism of these cells.
