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HIV

Finding latent needles in a haystack

Nature volume 543, pages 499–500 (2017)Cite this article

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Antiretroviral therapy can keep HIV at bay, but a few cells remain infected, so the disease cannot be cured. The discovery of a protein that marks out these infected cells will facilitate crucial studies of this latent viral reservoir. See Letter p.564

The development of combination antiretroviral therapy, which suppresses the replication of HIV in immune-system cells called CD4 T lymphocytes, is a major achievement of modern medicine1. However, a small proportion of these CD4 T cells retains the virus despite ongoing therapy, forming a latent HIV reservoir that can reactivate if treatment is stopped. Ways of eradicating this reservoir are an intense focus of research, but efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of analysing latently infected cells — of the order of one in a million CD4 T cells in an individual receiving antiretroviral therapy is latently infected, and markers for these cells have been lacking2,3. On page 564, Descours et al.4 have identified just such a marker for about half of the latently infected CD4 T cells in the blood.

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Figure 1: Hunting down an elusive cell population.

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References

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  1. Douglas D. Richman is at the Center for AIDS Research, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093–0679, USA, and at the Veteran Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, San Diego.,

    Douglas D. Richman

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  1. Douglas D. Richman
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Correspondence to Douglas D. Richman.

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Richman, D. Finding latent needles in a haystack. Nature 543, 499–500 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21899

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