Modern therapies help people living with HIV to survive, but scientists are still trying to decipher the deep mystery of how to eventually eradicate the virus for good. Now new laboratory work in Canada sheds light on the vulnerabilities of HIV's pockets of resistance in the body, and potential ways to thwart them.
Led by of Université de Montréal medical professor Éric Cohen, director of the human retrovirology unit at the UdeM-affiliated Montreal Clinical Research Institute, the work is published in the journal iScience.
The presence of cells containing latent forms of HIV, which are not sensitive to current antiretroviral treatments, is an obstacle to the eradication of HIV in people living with HIV. The elimination of these cells, known as reservoirs, would prevent the rebound of viremia observed in infected people who are on long-term treatment.
It would also prevent the progression of the disease when treatment is interrupted, as well as the chronic inflammation associated with the presence of these reservoirs, which leads to several co-morbidities such as cognitive impairment, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers.
Eradicating these reservoirs remains an important objective in the long-term battle against HIV, a virus that has disrupted and claimed so many lives since its appearance in in the early 1980s.
In their lab, Cohen and associate researcher Tram Pham assessed the impact of a family of molecules called ²SMAC Mimetic (SM)² which are used in the fight against cancer.
SM has two important properties. First, it reactivates the expression of genes that respond to the transcription factor called NFkB, such as those of HIV, without causing important proinflammatory reactions. Second, it promotes death in cells that express high levels of inhibitors of apoptosis (a type of cell death), such as HIV reservoirs.
