[Press release] Gladstone Institutes: New tool reveals the secrets of HIV-infected cells

Gladstone Institutes press release

For people living with HIV, life-saving antiretroviral therapy keeps their HIV-infected immune cells from making new copies of the virus, preventing illness and transmission.

Historically, these infected cells have been known as the “latent” HIV reservoir — implying that the HIV within the infected cells is completely inactive.

But notion that the entirety of the HIV reservoir is latent is actually a misleading description, because some reservoir cells can still be quite active. Even though antiretroviral therapy keeps full-fledged HI virus from being made, some of the infected cells continue spitting out viral products.

That means people with HIV who are on therapy still deal with fragments of the virus in their body, often resulting in long-term inflammation and related medical conditions, including organ damage and increased risk of heart attack. Also, the greater the number of such “active” reservoir cells in a patient, the faster their HIV will rebound if they stop treatment for any reason, such as losing access to it.

If scientists could gain a deeper understanding of the activity of genes in these cells, it could point to new possibilities for treating HIV, for example to eliminate these cells or prevent their ability to spit out fragments of HIV. But existing research methods have not been up to the task.

Now, scientists at Gladstone Institutes have developed a novel tool — named HIV-seq — for profiling the features of rare HIV-infected cells from people with HIV.

Read the full press release here.