Antiviral drugs can suppress HIV to near-undetectable levels, but they cannot eliminate it: the virus hides its genetic code inside dormant CD4+ T cells, and a subset called authentic reservoir clones can reignite infection if treatment stops. These cells are extraordinarily rare, on the order of one in a million, which has made them nearly impossible to study. A team led by Brad Jones at Weill Cornell Medicine, publishing in Nature, managed to collect them from people living with HIV and grow them in the laboratory.
Pitting the cultured reservoir cells against cytotoxic T lymphocytes, the immune system's main HIV-killing cells, over long periods produced an encouraging result: strong killer cells gradually wore down and eliminated most reservoir clones, apparently catching them in the brief moments when the virus became visible. But a stubborn subset resisted, surviving repeated rounds of cell division and persisting even without dividing, combining viral latency with resistance to cell death.
The team then tested deferoxamine, a drug already approved by the FDA for other uses, and found it raised oxidative stress in the resistant cells, rendering them more susceptible to immune killing. The researchers, supported by NIAID and the NIH-funded REACH collaboratory, plan to share their culture methods and build a catalogue of the survival mechanisms these cells deploy, a map that could guide combination strategies towards an eventual cure.