HIV Reservoir Clones Remain the Key Cure Obstacle
A NEW study offers a rare window into HIV reservoir clones that can survive for life despite antiretroviral therapy (ART).
HIV latency, where the virus lies dormant in long-lived CD4+ T cells, remains the main barrier to eradication, as these infected cells can reignite viraemia if treatment stops. In this work, researchers isolated “authentic reservoir clones” (ARCs), CD4+ T cell clones that both proliferate and harbour rebound-competent virus without being rapidly destroyed.
These HIV reservoir clones showed an unusual balance: at any given time, only a small fraction of cells within a clone expressed viral proteins, limiting their visibility to the immune system. This low-level expression was tied to stable host transcriptional programmes that…