To test that hypothesis, a team led by Robert Siliciano, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, began a longitudinal study of HIV patients to investigate the decay rate of these hidden reservoirs. If the reservoirs emptied in an average of, say five years, that might herald a cure. Unfortunately, the news wasn't good. As reported in this paper, they found that the half-life of the reservoir was 44 months, and they estimated that it would take 60 years of therapy to eliminate it entirely. They performed the study by isolating CD4+ T cells from peripheral blood and then growing them in conditions that encouraged the production of new viral particles.
The results conflicted with earlier studies in which researchers predicted the reservoir's complete eradication within two to three years.3 But those researchers were looking at a drop in viral levels that probably was caused by ...
