Feline virus, antiviral drug studied to understand drug ...(al model for the study research shifted ...)

He and his colleagues turned to tissue stored from another decade-old unrelated project that looked at how the virus suppressed the animals' immune systems.

We went back to those tissues and, in fact, found that the same virus mutations we saw in the cultured cell experiments were present in that brain tissue but only after long-term infection, he said.

The new research grant will use tissue culture methods to look specifically at how the presence of methamphetamine may increase the virus' ability to resist anitiviral drugs, in this case, a powerful AIDS drug called azidothymidine, or AZT.

We know a lot about AZT, how it works and what mutations it causes in the virus, he said. The researchers will treat FIV-infected cell cultures with low concentrations of AZT, forcing it to develop a resistance to the drug, repeating the procedure in the presence of methamphetamine.

We know how long it normally takes the mutation to appear in the virus. We predict that it will appear earlier in cells exposed to both AZT and methamphetamine, he said.

Mathes said that the first year of the project is focused on continued in vitro studies using both FIV and cat cell lines as well as parallel experiments with HIV in human cell lines.

If the results are promising, the researchers will test the drugs' interactions with the virus in a small study using two dozen cats in the second year.

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