With more than 35 million people worldwide living with the virus and nearly 2 million new cases each year, HIV remains a major global epidemic. While anti-retroviral therapy (ART) can control the infection, dormant HIV-infected immune cells persist in certain tissues throughout the body and can spring back into action if ART is interrupted. This latent viral reservoir is a major challenge in the development for a cure for HIV.
To better understand the mechanisms and pathology of HIV persistence, researchers, including Sizun Jiang, PhD, principal investigator in the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at BIDMC, developed a new approach that allowed the team to characterize the viral reservoir and immune responses within tissues infected with SIV, a related virus, compared to un-infected control tissues. Doing so revealed differences between the infected and uninfected tissues that enabled the scientists to propose a model for the mechanism by which SIV infection dampens the immune response.
