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New HIV Hiding Spot Revealed
from ScienceNOW Daily News
Powerful anti-HIV drugs have come tantalizingly close to eradicating the virus from people, driving the blood level of HIV so low that standard tests cannot detect it. But no one has been cured: the virus comes roaring back in everyone who stops taking the drugs.
A new study has identified one of HIV's main hideaways, raising intriguing possibilities about how to remove it. The work addresses a mystery first reported in 2006 by the lab of Robert Siliciano, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has developed the most sensitive test to find HIV.
... The researchers identified some white blood cells with CD4 receptors--the conductor of the immune system's orchestra and the main target of the virus--that held identical HIV sequences in their chromosomes. But in most people they studied, the virus in the blood did not match the sequence in the CD4 cells, indicating that HIV was hiding elsewhere. A team led by virologist Kathleen Collins of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, now has evidence that HIV hangs out inside bone marrow.
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