Category: Treatment
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One of the less well-publicized consequences of the persistent immune activation caused by HIV infection is a type of scarring damage to lymph tissues described as fibrosis. Some early studies of lymph nodes from HIV-infected individuals reported evidence of this problem, but it wasn’t until the publication of a study by the research group of…
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In August of 2011, researchers from the laboratory of David Baltimore published a high profile paper in the journal Nature suggesting that cell-to-cell HIV transmission facilitates ongoing viral replication in the face of antiretroviral therapy (ART). The authors proposed that this might represent a mechanism that sustains the reservoir of HIV-infected cells in people on long-term…
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On Friday at the International Workshop on HIV & Hepatitis Virus Drug Resistance and Curative Strategies in Sitges, Spain, Steve Yukl from UCSF presented new data on the case of Timothy Brown, the “Berlin Patient." Yukl described multiple experiments performed by several independent laboratories with the aim of searching intensively for any signs of residual HIV…
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A recent paper describing the engineering of stem cells to generate HIV-specific CD8 T cells has drawn considerable media attention and, regrettably but not untypically, many of the stories are profoundly misleading. Examples of headlines include: “Scientists engineer stem cells which suppress HIV: cure for AIDS possible” “New breakthrough shows stem cells can be engineered…
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Scientists continue to wrestle with the question of whether combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) completely suppresses HIV replication in most recipients. The development of ultra-sensitive “single copy” viral load tests (which can measure down to 0.3 HIV RNA copies in a milliliter of blood) has revealed that most individuals with levels below 50 copies show evidence…
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The December 1st issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases contains a raft of papers addressing the issue of HIV and aging (abstracts and links below). A report from the Swiss HIV Cohort Study documents that illnesses typically associated with aging are now the most common causes of morbidity in their cohort, which contains an increasing proportion…
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A major obstacle in the pursuit of a cure for HIV infection is the existence of long-lived cells containing viral DNA integrated into the cellular genome. These latently infected cells spark renewed rounds of viral replication when suppressive antiretroviral therapy (ART) is interrupted. Researchers are now aiming to develop strategies to purge latently infected cells,…
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A number of studies have documented that the body’s machinery for producing new immune system cells is impaired by HIV infection. In a new paper in the journal Blood, Delphine Sauce and colleagues delve into the issue further by analyzing circulating CD34+ hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPC) in over one hundred HIV positive individuals at various…
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Back in October 2009, Bob Siliciano’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins described a new in vitro system for screening drugs with the potential to reverse HIV latency. At the time of that publication, only one such compound had been identified using the screen, 5HN, which was too toxic to be considered for clinical evaluation. In a new…
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A study in the new issue of the Journal of Immunology suggests that triggering a cell surface molecule called toll-like receptor 8 (TLR8) may be a means to activating latent HIV infection. Erika Schlaepfer and Roberto Speck report that, in vitro, targeting TLR8 with the drug resiquimod (aka R-848) prompted HIV activity in latently infected…