OPI NION Highlights on HIV eradication in 2013

Virological remarks for HIV cure and eradication Latently HIV-1-infected cells are rare (especially in peripheral blood), but undistinguishable from uninfected cells, thus making their clearance extremely demanding. In addition, despite several efforts, a real consensus on mechanisms by which persistent HIV-1 reservoirs are established and maintained is still lacking, thus explaining why strategies adopted so far to reverse HIV-1 latency in vivo are still incipient in terms of efficacy. So far, latency-reversing agents can induce the production of replication-competent virus from only 1 out of 1 million resting CD4þ lymphocytes. Some light on the nature of this non-induced provirus has been recently shed by Siliciano’s group at last Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) [1]. Surprisingly, they show that around 12% of the non-induced provirus is replication-competent with intact proviral genome and long-terminal repeat (LTR) function. Notably, by investigating the sites of HIV-1 DNA