Abstract
Despite the benefits achieved by the widespread availability of modern antiretroviral therapy (ART), HIV RNA integration into the host cell genome is responsible for the creation of latent HIV reservoirs, and represents a significant impediment to completely eliminating HIV infection in a patient via modern ART alone. Several methods to measure HIV reservoir size exist; however, simpler, cheaper, and faster tools are required in the quest for total HIV cure. Over the past few years, measurement of HIV-specific antibodies has evolved into a promising option for measuring HIV reservoir size, as they can be measured via simple, well-known techniques such as the western blot and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). In this article, we re-visit the dynamic evolution of HIV-1-specific antibodies and the factors that may influence their levels in the circulation of HIV-positive individuals. Then, we describe the currently-known relationship between HIV-1-specific antibodies and HIV reservoir size based on study of data from contemporary literature published during the past 5 years. We conclude by highlighting current trends, and discussing the individual HIV-specific antibody that is likely to be the most reliable antibody for potential future utilization for quantification of HIV reservoir size.
Highlights
Today, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection remains a major public health burden despite four decades of massive monetary and intellectual investment into HIV research globally [1]
In 2020, 27.4 million of the 37.6 million people living with HIV (PLWH) are reported to be on antiretroviral therapy (ART), which is more than triple the number of patients on ART recorded in 2010 (7.8 million)
Further investigated whether humoral biomarkers of reservoir size can estimate the reservoir size in ART-treated subjects, and they observed that IgG-gp41 (r=0.597, p=0.011) and IgG3-gp120 (r=0.135, p=0.029) HIV-specific antibodies correlate with the size of the HIV reservoir in these subjects [99]
Summary
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection remains a major public health burden despite four decades of massive monetary and intellectual investment into HIV research globally [1]. Several published articles suggest that measurement of HIVspecific antibodies may provide a reliable, cost-effective, and highly reproducible tool to estimate HIV reservoir size in HIVpositive individuals on ART This concept was conceived after researchers observed lower residual blood cell-associated HIV-1 DNA levels [58, 92,93,94,95,96] and low or absent HIV-1-specific antibody levels [66, 97, 98] in the first few months of life in perinatally infected infants, when viral suppression occurs following ART initiation.
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