The French Connection Brigitte Autran M.D., from France, presented her work on how the V-beta repertoire becomes skewed as a result of HIV infection. Dr. Autran showed that a trend towards normalization occurs following successful treatment with potent protease inhibitor containing regimens and correlates nicely with the second phase rise in T cells, as well as with the percentage of cells that are naive - that is are brand new and have yet to becalled into action. She then extrapolated outward and predicted that it would take approximately seven years of a highly suppressive regimen for a near complete normalization of the CD4 cell repertoire. You say you want reconstitution, well, you know Dr. Autran's work points to the controversy of the origin of these naive cells.
Traditional dogma holds that adults no longer have a functioning thymus.
T cells are however capable of maturing outside of the thymus, but are generally thought to have a much narrower range of specificity. They did this by infusing HIV-infected volunteers with this special blood sugar, and then taking blood samples and analyzing them. The Circle Game Rafick Senkaly, Ph.D, from the University of Montreal, also in collaboration with Dr. McCune, explained his work with excision circles. These loops of DNA are made when the T cell rearranges its V,D, and J genes which code for the variablr portion of the T cell receptor. These circular byproducts are only present in brand new T cells, their progeny will lack these circles.