Drugs fail to reawaken dormant HIV infection

Scientists at Johns Hopkins report that compounds they hoped would “wake up” dormant reservoirs of HIV inside immune system T cells — a strategy designed to reverse latency and make the cells vulnerable to destruction — have failed to do so in laboratory tests of such white blood cells taken directly from patients infected with HIV. “Despite our high hopes, none of the compounds we tested in HIV-infected cells taken directly from patients activated the latent virus,” says Robert F. Siliciano, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Siliciano is senior author of a report on the disappointing results published online March 23 in Nature Medicine. The failure challenges the idea that a single so-called latency-reversing agent can uncover the HIV hiding out in the cells of patients whose viral load is essentially undetectable with blood tests. While inactive, the...