When Undetectable Is Unachievable: Study Offers Insights into HIV Persistence | NIH: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

When Undetectable Is Unachievable: Study Offers Insights into HIV Persistence | NIH: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Tuesday, March 5, 2019 When Undetectable Is Unachievable: Study Offers Insights into HIV Persistence For most people living with HIV, antiretroviral therapy (ART) reduces viral load—the amount of HIV in the blood—to a level so low that it cannot be detected with standard tests. However, in rare cases, people living with HIV are unable to maintain an undetectable viral load despite strict adherence to daily ART. New NIAID-funded research suggests that this sometimes can occur when a single cell from the HIV reservoir—the population of long-lived HIV-infected cells that ART cannot eradicate—multiplies to create many identical cells that produce enough virus to be detected by standard viral load tests. The findings, presented today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2019), help explain how HIV reservoirs persist for many years during ART, information that is critical to help advance HIV cure research.