Sunil K. Ahuja, M.D., was on the research team that discovered the protein apoE4 can predict the disease course of HIV patients.
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Contact: Will Sansom, (210)567-2579

SAN ANTONIO (June 17, 2008) — A protein that is one of the major predictors of Alzheimer’s disease also predicts how quickly patients with HIV progress toward death, San Antonio scientists reported this week.

Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, along with colleagues in Maryland and California, said the new study provides more conclusive evidence of a link for the protein, called apoE4, to infectious diseases, namely HIV.

Comparison of two proteins
The report is in this week’s online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research team studied a population of 1,300 European and African-American HIV-infected patients.

The scientists compared the HIV disease progression of two groups: patients who have two copies of the gene that makes the apoE4 protein and patients who have two copies of a gene that makes a related protein, apoE3.

ApoE3 differs from apoE4 by a single amino acid.

Patients with apoE4 protein more likely to die from HIV
Scientists found that the apoE4 group generally progressed twice as fast through the HIV disease course and were more likely to die from HIV than the apoE3 group.

New evidence bucks current thinking
“The prevailing view is that apoE4 plays a role only in non-infectious diseases such as Alzheimer’s, but we found clear evidence to the contrary,” said study co-author Sunil K. Ahuja, M.D., professor of medicine, microbiology, immunology and biochemistry at the UT Health Science Center and director of the Veterans Administration Research Center for AIDS and HIV-1 Infection in the South Texas Veterans Health Care System.

“These findings are very exciting because there are major efforts under way to find small molecules that make apoE4 more like apoE3,” said Hemant Kulkarni, M.D., a co-author from the UT Health Science Center.

“Such therapies might have application not only in Alzheimer’s but also HIV disease,” said Matthew Dolan, M.D., a co-author from Wilford Hall Medical Center in San Antonio and a long-term collaborator of Dr. Ahuja.

Researchers involved in the study
Paper co-authors are Dr. Ahuja, Dr. Kulkarni, and Weijing He, M.D.; of the Health Science Center, and Dr. Dolan; Brian Agan, M.D.; and Vincent Marconi, M.D., of Wilford Hall Medical Center and the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Program of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Md. They performed the research with colleagues Robert W. Mahley, M.D., Ph.D., of the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, and Trevor Burt, M.D., and Joseph M. McCune, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco.

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