Hope was once high that, over time, antiretroviral therapy would rid patients of HIV-infected cells. Such hopes hinged on the presumption that these drugs could reach any and all HIV reservoirs.
That's clearly not the case, as the title of a recent conference in the French West Indies attests: the 1st International Workshop on HIV Persistence during Therapy. "HIV persistently replicates, even in infected patients whose levels of plasma viremia have fallen below detectable levels while on [medication]," wrote Tae-Wook Chun.1 Thus, take a patient off the now-standard cocktail of antiretroviral agents known as highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART), and viremia comes roaring back (see
To eliminate the hidden HIV reservoir, researchers have been investigating strategies to activate HIV transcription in latently infected cells, and to eliminate selectively those cells that harbor the virus. Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health calls the combination ...
