We now know a little more about the rare carriers of HIV who manage to control the infection after the interruption of all antiretroviral treatment.
- Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, is caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which destroys the immune defences.
- In 2017, nearly 37 million people were living with the virus and 940,000 died from it.
Rare HIV carriers, called “post-treatment controllers” or “PTCs”, are able to control the infection after all antiretroviral therapy has been stopped.
New therapeutic strategies
Understanding the fundamental mechanisms that govern the immune response in these people is essential in order to develop vaccines against HIV and/or new therapeutic strategies that target remission of the infection.
New French research, published in NatureCommunicationstherefore studied the humoral immune response – ie mediated by specific antibodies – in certain PTCs in which transient episodes of virus activity were observed. “The researchers showed that their humoral immune response was both effective and robust, which could contribute to the control of the infection in the absence of treatment”, explain the teams from the Institut Pasteur, Inserm, AP-HP and ANRS.
Two types of humoral immune response
More specifically, two types of humoral immune response have been identified: a strong and a weak one. The discovery of these two categories of humoral immune response, dependent on the PTC profile, sheds new light on the phenomenon of HIV control.
For Hugo Mouquet, researcher at the Institut Pasteur and principal investigator of the study, “These results show that the establishment of early antiretroviral treatment can facilitate the optimal development of humoral immune responses, making it possible in some cases to counter viral rebound after interruption of treatment”.
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