There’s huge excitement in the press about newly engineered immune cells that can damage HIV, despite the virus’s disguises. Writing in Nature Medicine, scientists from the US and UK report making T cells that bind to the HIV-1 strain of the virus 450 times more strongly than natural T cells.

“The T-cell receptor is nature’s way of scanning and removing infected cells – it is uniquely designed for the job but probably fails in HIV because of the tremendous capability of the virus to mutate,” says Bent Jakobsen, paper author and chief scientific officer at the company which owns the technology, Adaptimmune (press release 1).

“Now we have managed to engineer a receptor that is able to detect HIV’s key fingerprints and is able to clear HIV infection in the laboratory. If we can translate those results in the clinic, we could at last have a very powerful therapy on our hands.”

Clinical trials in patients with advanced HIV will begin next year (press release 2). Although HIV could mutate to avoid the engineered T cells doing so could weaken it.

“In the face of our engineered assassin cells, the virus will either die or be forced to change its disguises again, weakening itself along the way,” says paper author Sewell (press release 1). “We’d prefer the first option but I suspect we’ll see the latter.”

A number of news sources says these ‘bionic assassins’ are to be “sent on a search-and-destroy mission against [the] HIV virus’? Alternatively, ‘pimped up T-cells’ are off to ‘seek out and destroy HIV’?

Well, leaving aside the RAS syndrome in the first one they don’t really ‘search’ for HIV, they attack it if they bump into it, so this isn’t really right.

These may be ‘souped-up immune cells’, they may be ‘assassin cells’, but sadly the image of them relentlessly hunting down HIV is a little far fetched.

Image: AIDS virus (HIV). computer model produced by Richard Feldmann / NIH