HIV Digest	HIV Digest Archive

While some AIDS researchers, such as Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, believe that HIV reservoirs may ultimately be eliminated from the body using highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), others are not so optimistic.

Robert Siliciano, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University, has studied about 60 patients who are known to be compliant with their drug regimens and found that the size of the virus reservoirs decay so gradually that they will likely continue for life. Ho notes, however, that there are many untested drug regimens, so "we should not completely give up on the eradication idea until we have a good go at attacking with more potent combinations at all the sites available."

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Another possible approach is using HAART interruptions, or drug holidays, to reduce the toxicity of the treatment while keeping the benefits. Intermittent treatment with interleukin-2 may also show hope in creating a CD4 cell response.

A primary focus right now is therapeutic vaccine research, or the use of a vaccine for patients already infected with HIV. The vaccine would not be preventive, but hopefully would bring HIV infection under control permanently. The therapeutic vaccine Remune-- which is currently being tested in the United States, Europe, and Thailand-- has been shown to cause CD4 cells to proliferate, although there is not yet evidence that the immune response it generates could help control HIV. Also, a candidate vaccine made from an inactivated form of the HIV protein Tat has shown promise in animal studies, prompting renowned AIDS researcher Robert Gallo to suggest that a vaccine based on Tat toxoid could be a part of a multicomponent therapeutic vaccine.

Editor's Note: from Nature