Where is HIV hiding?
Biologists have found a new HIV "bunker" in the human body
The immunodeficiency virus can hide not only in T-lymphocytes, but also in so-called macrophages, which will complicate the procedure of its "expulsion" from the body in the treatment of an old infection, scientists say in an article published in the journal Nature Medicine (Honeycutt et al., HIV persistence in tissue macrophages of humanized myeloid-only mice during antiretroviral therapy).
"These are revolutionary conclusions in their significance, as they show that HIV can hide not only in T cells, but also in other tissues of the body. The fact that HIV is able to survive inside macrophages means that any therapy should be able to destroy the virus in two very different types of cells," said Jenna Honeycutt from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in a press release UNC Researchers Identify a New HIV Reservoir – VM).
Here and below to the words "new bunker", "revolutionary", "found out", etc. it is necessary to introduce an amendment to the specifics of the genre of news for the press. In the introduction to the article in Nature Medicine it is written more modestly:
"Tissue macrophages are a critical factor in the pathogenesis of HIV (1, 2, 3), but their specific role in the persistence of HIV with prolonged suppressive antiretroviral therapy has not been established to date (4, 5, 6)" – VM.
As scientists explain, today HIV patients can live for decades thanks to the use of antiretroviral drugs – substances that suppress the replication of the virus in the cells of the body. Since they often have strong side effects, doctors are often forced to stop taking them for several weeks.
When HIV is stopped, it "gets out of the trenches" and begins to intensively copy itself, often returning to the initial level in two to three weeks. In recent years, scientists have been actively trying to find drugs or antibodies that would help avoid such a "counterattack" of the virus, or would allow the virus to be "kicked out" of cells.
Honeycutt and her colleagues found out that the virus "digs in" not only in the T-cells that it usually infects, but also in the so–called macrophages - amoeboid cells that destroy bacteria, toxic particles and various "garbage".
Scientists came to this conclusion by experimenting on a special breed of mice whose bone marrow consists of human, not mouse cells. Such rodents are now used to study diseases that attack various components of the immune system, including HIV. By changing the properties of bone marrow cells, scientists can "turn off" various components of the immune system, which makes it possible to understand what exactly affects the virus and how it does it.
Observing what happened when HIV entered the body of mice whose immune system lacked T cells, scientists realized that the virus successfully multiplied in the body of animals. Having followed this process "live", Honeycutt and her team saw that the virus can penetrate not only T cells, but also macrophages.
Having discovered a similar trend, American virologists checked whether HIV could "dig in" in macrophages and survive treatment with antiretroviral drugs. As it turned out, this really happens – in the body of about 30% of the mice that biologists experimented with, the virus "resurrected" after scientists stopped adding drugs to rodent food.
According to scientists, macrophages can act as the main hidden "reservoir" of HIV, which re-starts the infection after the destruction of virus particles with the help of antibodies, drugs or cleansing the body of T cells. Understanding where such cells accumulate during the administration of antiretroviral drugs and how they can be dealt with will be the key to creating a truly effective cure for HIV, concludes Honeycutt.
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19.04.2017