Getting the measure of hidden HIV
Could knowing how much viral DNA lurks in the white blood cells of people with HIV accelerate the development of new therapies and potential cures for HIV infection?
HIV is a virus that can hide in, and hijack, the cells of the immune system and force them to make new copies of the virus. This eventually destroys the infected cells and weakens the ability of a person with HIV to fight off infections and disease. If diagnosed early and treated, most people with HIV now live long and healthy lives and do not develop AIDS — the last stage of HIV infection when previously harmless, opportunistic infections can become life-threatening. However, there are still numerous hurdles and challenges that must be overcome before a cure for HIV/AIDS can be developed.
Treatment with drugs called antiretrovirals can reduce the amount of the HIV virus circulating in an infected person’s bloodstream to undetectable levels. However, when HIV infects a cell, the virus inserts a copy of its genetic material into the cell’s DNA — and, for most patients, antiretroviral treatment does not tackle these ‘hidden viruses’. As such, and in spite of their side-effects, antiretroviral drugs have to be taken for life in case the hidden viruses re-emerge.
As research into a cure for HIV/AIDS gathers momentum, patients who might be candidates for new experimental treatments will need to be identified. Although it is not recommended as part of standard clinical care, the only way to test if a patient’s viral levels would remain suppressed without the drugs would be to temporarily stop the treatment under the close supervision of a physician. As such, a new method is needed to identify if there are patients who might benefit from stopping antiretroviral therapy, and more importantly, those who might not.
Now James Williams, Jacob Hurst and co-workers have tested whether measuring the levels of HIV DNA directly might help to predict if, and when, the virus might re-emerge (or rebound). In a group of HIV patients participating in a clinical trial, those with higher levels of HIV DNA at the point that the treatment was stopped were found to experience faster viral rebound than those with lower levels of HIV DNA. This method could therefore identify those patients who are at the greatest risk of HIV viral rebound, and are therefore unlikely to benefit if their treatment is interrupted.
Williams, Hurst and co-workers also found that measuring the levels of HIV DNA could help to predict how the disease would progress in treated and untreated patients. Furthermore, these predictions were more accurate than those based on measuring the amount of the virus circulating in a patient’s body.
The next challenge is to identify other methods to distinguish patients who may remain ‘virus-free’ for a period without treatment, from those who would not. With this achieved, it might be possible to identify the mechanisms that determine why the virus comes back and so develop new treatments to stop this happening. This would make developing a cure for HIV/AIDS a much more tangible prospect.
To find out more
Listen to John Frater discuss HIV cure research in episode 15 of the eLife podcast.
Read the eLife research paper on which this story is based: “HIV-1 DNA predicts disease progression and post-treatment virological control” (September 12, 2014).
Read a commentary on this research paper: “HIV Cure Research: Biomarker reveals HIV’s hidden reservoir”.
To read more from eLife about HIV, check out…
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