Imagine a game of chess where your opponent’s king is in check. It cannot move, but the game is not over—the piece remains on the board. This is how the body might control HIV on its own: The virus would be contained and unable to replicate or spread, but it would not have been eliminated. This is the goal of Professor Ole Schmeltz Søgaard and an international team of researchers—to enable more patients’ immune systems to keep the virus permanently in check without the need for daily medication. Their findings suggest that this requires two key components working in tandem: antibodies and T cells.
In a study published in Nature Immunology, the researchers followed patients who stopped taking their daily HIV medication after receiving experimental treatment. In a small group of patients, the virus has not returned.
“We can see that two branches of the immune system work together to control the virus. One targets one aspect of the virus, the other targets another. Together, they are effective enough to prevent the virus from escaping,” says Søgaard, Professor of Infectious Diseases at Aarhus University Hospital.
