Why Can't We Cure HIV Infection?

Virus reservoirs persist in HIV-infected patients despite suppressive antiretroviral therapy (ART). Whether these reservoirs are maintained by ongoing viral replication is controversial. Investigators recently assessed how replication might occur even in the presence of ART.

The investigators reasoned that infection of one cell by multiple virions might allow HIV to escape inhibition by an antiretroviral agent. In vitro experiments showed that sensitivity to the nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor tenofovir was much lower when cells were infected with multiple viruses than when they were infected with few viruses.

This finding suggested that cell-to-cell spread of HIV, which could result in multiple infection events per target cell, mi…