Publications by authors named "Stephen H Lai"
Article Synopsis
- Microbial translocation happens when the gut barrier is compromised, allowing microbial components to enter the bloodstream and trigger immune responses, which can lead to chronic inflammation and worsen various diseases.
- Identifying reliable biomarkers for microbial translocation is important but challenging due to the limitations in detection methods and the influence of other biological factors.
- In studies involving HIV patients and SIV-infected macaques, certain proteins linked to cellular stress were not found to correlate with elevated microbial translocation biomarkers, indicating that inflammation from cell death doesn't affect these biomarker levels.
Article Synopsis
- CD8+ T cell responses are crucial for controlling the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), but factors influencing their antiviral effectiveness are not fully understood, particularly due to previous research mainly focusing on circulating CD8+ T cells.
- A study analyzed SIV-specific CD8+ T cells from various anatomical locations in rhesus macaques with differing viral loads, revealing no major differences in response magnitude between the groups.
- Rhesus macaques with lower viral loads exhibited a higher frequency of functional CD8+ T cells in lymphoid tissues and a greater diversity of Gag-specific T cell clonotypes in mesenteric lymph nodes, indicating that the functionality and localization of these cells are key to their effectiveness against SIV.
Among the numerous immunological abnormalities observed in chronically human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected individuals, perturbations in memory CD4 T cells are thought to contribute specifically to disease pathogenesis. Among these, functional imbalances in the frequencies of T regulatory cells (Tregs) and interleukin 17 (IL-17)/IL-22-producing Th cells (Th17/Th22) from mucosal sites and T follicular helper (Tfh) cells in lymph nodes are thought to facilitate specific aspects of disease pathogenesis. However, while preferential infection of Tfh cells is widely thought to create an important viral reservoir in an immunologically privileged site , whether immunological perturbations among memory CD4 T cell populations are attributable to their relative infectivity by the virus is unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntestinal microbial dysbiosis has been described in individuals with an HIV-1 infection and may underlie persistent inflammation in chronic infection, thereby contributing to disease progression. Herein, we induced an HIV-1-like intestinal dysbiosis in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) with vancomycin treatment and assessed the contribution of dysbiosis to SIV disease progression. Dysbiotic and control animals had similar disease progression, indicating that intestinal microbial dysbiosis similar to that observed in individuals with HIV is not sufficient to accelerate untreated lentiviral disease progression.
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