The following is a summary of “Eliminating the HIV tissue reservoir: current strategies and challenges,” published in the December 2023 issue of Infectious Disease by Li et al.
Researchers started a retrospective study to identify the tissue reservoirs where HIV persists despite effective antiretroviral therapy, hindering the development of a cure for AIDS.
They followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Searches on Pubmed, Embase, and Scopus (June 2023) were done to find relevant literature from the past decade.
The results showed a review of current strategies and treatments for eliminating HIV tissue reservoirs. Including early and intensive therapy, gene therapy (such as ribozyme, RNA interference, RNA aptamer, zinc finger enzyme, transcriptional activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/associated nuclease 9 (CRISPR/Cas9)), ‘Shock and Kill,’ ‘Block and lock,’ immunotherapy (comprising therapeutic vaccines, broadly neutralising antibodies (bNAbs), chimeric antigen receptor T-cell immunotherapy (CAR-T)), and haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT).
Investigators concluded that despite progress in reducing the HIV reservoir, its persistence remains the primary barrier to an AIDS cure, highlighting the need for further research to develop effective and reliable eradication strategies.
Source: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23744235.2023.2298450