Tackling HIV/AIDS - Are we there yet?

Abstract

Copyright: © 2013 Alla NR, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. It has been three decades since HIV has been discovered [1] and over seventeen years Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) has emerged as the first line of therapy to cure the disease that has affected millions of lives. Currently close to 34 million people around the globe are suffering with HIV/AIDS and over 8 million people are receiving ART in low and middle income countries [2]. ART has dramatically improved the expectancy and quality of life of HIV/AIDS victims. Nevertheless, current ART cannot get rid of HIV infection totally and requires lifelong adherence. ART administration is burdensome to the public health systems because of the cost associated with it. Hence there is a need for other possible treatment strategies for lifetime treatment to patients with affordable costs to health systems. Failure to eradicate HIV during ART indicates the inherent stability of the viral genome. Persistence of HIV in small pool of CD4+ T cells even under the viral suppression with ART establishes latency. The CD4+ T cells with stable and longlived latent virus serve as a HIV reservoir. The permanence of the HIV reservoirs might be responsible for prolonged immune activation and inflammation observed in people with suppressed viremia, which, in line, may be associated with co-morbidities like cardiovascular events, renal insufficiency and hepatic failure [3]. A study by Ho et al. published in the journal Cell has shown that the latent viral reservoir is 60 times larger than previously believed [4]. Hence this reservoir poses threat for the complete eradication of HIV/AIDS.