Research Shows Eradicating Active HIV In Patients More Difficult Than Previously Thought

A new report by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and published Thursday in the journal Cell “found that the amount of potentially active HIV that lurks in infected immune-system cells could be up to 60 times as large as previously observed,” a result that “poses a major hurdle for a promising strategy researchers have hoped might one day eradicate the virus and enable HIV patients to go off therapy,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The new report suggests ‘it’s going to be quite a bit harder than we thought to get rid of all the virus that could rekindle the infection if a patient stops treatment,’ said Robert Siliciano, an AIDS researcher at Johns Hopkins and the study’s senior author,” the newspaper writes (Winslow/McKay, 10/24).

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