HAART Failure Revisited

Maxwell Gordon, in a letter to The Scientist,¹ agrees with the main point of my Commentary article² that latency is a primary factor in the failure of current therapies. Antibiotics cannot reach the reservoirs of latent HIVs in the genomes of their host cells, so that, as researchers have long known,³ combinations of antibiotics must be combined with agents capable of flushing out latent viruses. Studies of the latency phenomenon, which might have identified such agents, should have received a higher priority on the research agenda.

At issue is the question of the extent to which failure to flush out latent virus has contributed to antibiotic resistance. The use of multiple antibiotics is designed to counter this problem, but as the duration of therapy increases, the possibility of generating variants resistant to one or more of the antibiotics must arise. The study of Finzi et al....