Program seeks Council approval for an initiative titled “Characterization and Quantification of HIV Reservoirs in Children.” HIV antiretroviral therapy (ARV) achieves complete or nearly complete HIV suppression and in that way drastically increases the life expectancy of people living with HIV infection.
Despite the overwhelming success of ARV, it fails to eradicate/cure HIV infection even in patients who suppress the virus in plasma to undetectable levels for many years. Although ARV can suppress HIV-1 infection to undetectable levels of plasma viremia, integrated latent HIV-1 genomes that encode replication-competent virus persists primarily in resting CD4+ T cells. This latent reservoir represents the main barrier to cure. Any progress in developing effective interventions for an HIV cure in children and adults will be dramatically accelerated by the development and validation of an assay and/or biomarker(s) that can quantify the size and distribution of this HIV latent reservoir.
Our goal: Eliminating this reservoir, referred to as sterilizing cure, or stimulating the immune response to control infection in the presence of a significantly smaller reservoir and in the absence of therapy, referred as functional cure, are the primary aims of cure research. Although both strategies present some unresolved challenges, both strategies will need the ability to properly characterize the latent reservoir and appropriately measure its size and distribution. Unfortunately, current assays used to track reservoir size are limited in detecting small amounts of viral reservoir thereby hampering our ability to properly measure and know the effectiveness of strategies to eliminate those viral reservoirs. Our goal with this initiative is to address this central challenge by supporting research aimed at improving the ability to characterize and measure the HIV reservoir.
This initiative aligns with the NICHD Vision areas of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease and Reproduction.
This proposed concept aligns with the MPIDB research priority on HIV: Cure/Remission in Infants and Children.
This initiative addresses the overarching HIV/AIDS priorities of a) Research Toward a Cure b) Develop Next Generation HIV Therapies.
Program Contact
Eric Lorenzo
Maternal and Pediatric Infectious Diseases Branch
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