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Another step towards effective HIV/AIDS treatment
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Gladstone University scientists have brought us one step closer to understanding and overcoming one of the least understood mechanisms of HIV infection. They have developed a method to precisely track the life cycle of individual cells infected with HIV, which causes AIDS.
Researcher Leor Weinberger announced the development of a device that will be able to recognize blood components and calculate the number of CD4 cells or T-lymphocytes, which indicate HIV activity. This device will help to understand what the latent period of the virus is like after a patient begins antiretroviral therapy. Unfortunately, this type of treatment does not kill the virus, but only “scares” it, which means a lifelong drug battle against the main enemy - AIDS. If you stop therapy, the “sleeping” virus wakes up and begins to attack the body's immune system.
The main strategic weapon against this terrible disease is to understand the mechanism of action of the virus. Then it will be possible to eradicate it from the body and thus heal.
“HIV latency is probably the biggest obstacle to eradicating the HIV/AIDS virus,” says Dr. Weinberger, who is also a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Carolina in San Francisco. “To date, all the methods that scientists around the world have used to try to uncover the viral mechanisms have been ineffective. Our technique provides a clear path to understanding how dormant HIV adapts to life within a single cell. We are tracking individual cells, which have traditionally been very difficult to monitor.”
Time-lapse microscopy, which collects information about a single cell, has recently helped track some viral infections and determine why they become resistant to treatment. But the technique has proven ill-suited to monitoring HIV-infected cells, especially during the latent period of infection, because these cells are mobile and evasive, attacking, attaching to, and detaching from neighboring cells.
A team of researchers led by Dr. Weinberger has developed a clever system that restricts the mobility of HIV-infected cells by confining them to special tiny tubes.
"We first drop the cells into a small well where they settle to the bottom. The well is filled with nutrients that keep the cells functional," explains Brandon Razouki, one of the study's authors and a PhD student at Gladstone University.
"We then tilt the device, and the cells fall out of the well and into the microscopic tubules connected to it. When we turn the device back upright, we end up with about 25 cells trapped inside each tubule."
This way, the cells remain in place, and scientists can monitor the activity of an individual cell without interference. “This means that we now have the ability to analyze the entire cycle of HIV infection in a single cell, especially during the latency period,” says Dr. Weinberger.
"With this new knowledge, we hope to develop a treatment system that will detect the latent virus and eliminate it from the patient's body once and for all," the study's leader concluded.
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