2023-06-19 17:21:27
HIV can remain latent for years in certain cells of the human body. American researchers announce that a type of cells present in the brain can constitute a durable reservoir for the virus.
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The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has the ability to integrate its retro-transcribed DNA into the genome of our own cells. It can stay hidden there for years. Antiretroviral therapies were designed to maintain this latent state as long as the drugs are taken by patients. But if the treatment is stopped, the HIV can come out of its torpor and infect the T4 lymphocytes until the immunity is destroyed.
These T4 lymphocytes are the preferred hiding place of HIV, but it is not the only one. Other cells in the body can accommodate it. Scientists from the University of San Diego, Pennsylvania and Emory have shown that HIV can also integrate its DNA into microglia in the brain; these cells function like macrophages and protect it from pathogens that would be able to cross the blood-brain barrier. They have a lifespan of several years, which offers HIV a permanent and stable hiding place.
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A discovery made thanks to donors
To achieve this discovery, the American scientists benefited from donations from the volunteers of the project The Last Gift, “the last gift” in French. This project, led by the University of San Diego, brings together people with HIV and treated with antiretroviral therapy who suffer from another fatal disease and who have agreed to donate their bodies to science and research.
The scientists were thus able to obtain brain tissue samples from four volunteers. Thanks to their experiments, they succeeded in isolating a large number of microglia from the rest of the brain cells and in extracting HIV proviruses from them – the viral DNA integrated into the genome of the cells – capable of reforming infectious virions. Thus, microglia can be a potential reservoir for HIV and the origin of relapse of infection. ” It’s very difficult to know how important this tank is. The problem when you want to eradicate HIV is comparable to that of cancer. You want to be able to identify it and eliminate it completely so it doesn’t come back “, explains David Margolis, epidemiologist and one of the principal investigators of this study published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
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