Posted on August 08, 2016
Source: Science Daily
"After fully sequencing the latent HIV 'provirus' genomes from 19 people being treated for HIV, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine report that even in patients who start treatment very early, the only widely available method to measure the reservoir of dormant HIV in patients is mostly counting defective viruses that won't cause harm, rather than those that can spring back into action and keep infections going.
Specifically, the investigators showed that more than 90 percent of latent proviruses are genetic duds, so mutated -- even in early stages of disease -- that they no longer function. The findings, described August 8 in Nature Medicine online, suggest a pressing need for new ways to count only non-damaged proviruses, because an accurate count is key to guiding and gauging the effectiveness of experimental therapies directed at the latent HIV reservoir.
'To cure HIV, you want to get rid of the proviruses without defects,' says senior study author Robert Siliciano, M.D., Ph.D., an infectious disease physician and molecular biologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 'But our work shows that the standard assays used to do that are measuring forms of the virus that are not really relevant to these cure strategies.'"
