The Basics on HIV and How Grid Computing is Beneficial

H - Human - Can only infect human beings
I - Immunodeficiency - Weakens the immune system by destroying the cells that fight infection and disease
V - Virus - A virus is only able to reproduce itself by taking over a cell in the body of its host

HIV lives and reproduces in blood and other body fluids such as pre-seminal fluid, semen, breast milk, vaginal fluid and rectal mucous. It can be transmitted from human to human through sexual contact, during pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, as a result of injection drug use, occupational exposure and as a result of a blood transfusion. The virus takes a long time to show its effects on the body--so much that if it is not caught in time, it could have already done a large amount of damage to the body.

For most viruses that the body encounters, the immune system is able to clear it out on its own. However, with HIV, the immune system is not able to clear out the virus and begins to attack the T-cells and the CD4 cells in the immune system. The human body needs these cells in order to fight infections, but instead HIV invades them and uses them to make copies of itself before destroying them. Over time, this can lead to the prevention of fighting infections and disease which in turn can lead to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).

Here is a short video to better understand the life cycle of HIV and how it enters the cell.

Normal people with healthy immune systems can be exposed to certain bacteria, viruses and parasites without experiencing serious sickness. For those living with HIV, however, these common maladies (known as "opportunistic infections") can cause serious illnesses when they come into contact with the host's weakened immune system. One example of an opportunistic infection is pneumonia--when people with healthy immune systems get pneumonia they are sick for a short while, but most fully recover. For someone living with HIV/AIDS, the body's defense would be so weak that this infection could lead to death.

Although at this time there is no cure for HIV/AIDS, scientists are continuously searching for a cure and developing treatments in the process. One thing that is helping find a cure for HIV is grid-computing: the process of our global community working together through the usage of personal computers to gather and calculate raw data pertinent to current biological and medical issues. By having individual computers on the grid, these grid-computing programs run in the background while the computer is on just crunching numbers and data, and periodically they send information back to the institution conducting research. For this service-learning project we are using Rosetta@home (http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/) to actively participate in finding the cure for HIV.

 

Here is a short video on how some of the medicines help treat HIV.

 

To learn more about how HIV's rapidly mutating composition has made it difficult to defeat and about HIV's immunity to drugs being produced today, check out this video as well.