Delivering impact to support AIDS research
LGC is helping to ensure that research into a cure for HIV is based on sound fundamental measurements.
Over 36 million people currently live with HIV, with approximately 2 million becoming infected each year (WHO 2015). Although HIV can be successfully managed with combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), the therapy must be continued indefinitely as no cure presently exists. This can be challenging in regions with high HIV prevalence and long-term use can potentially have toxic side effects.
One barrier to curing HIV is the presence of infected host cells that are not targeted by current therapies but lay dormant (so-called ‘viral reservoir’). These cells have the potential to become re-activated so novel strategies to cure HIV aim to target this reservoir. To determine whether these new approaches are successful, accurate and robust, methods for measuring HIV DNA are required.
The Molecular and Cell Biology team at LGC perform research to support accurate and reliable measurement as part of our National Measurement Laboratory (NML) role. Recent work by NML scientists comparing different molecular methods (qPCR, digital PCR) for quantification of HIV DNA has raised some concerns around the current popular choice of calibrator used to compare results between HIV clinical studies (8E5, ATCC® CRL-8993). It appears to lose HIV DNA copies during cell growth, potentially producing misleading estimates of how much HIV DNA is present and affecting whether novel strategies towards curing HIV are deemed successful or not.
Based in part on our work, the NIH AIDS Reagent Program, which provides critical reagents and resources to support research in the areas of AIDS therapeutics and vaccine development, has recently highlighted the potential instability of the standard on its reagent database to support the research community and enable the best chances of success.
Citation:
Busby E et al. Instability of 8E5 calibration standard revealed by digital PCR risks inaccurate quantification of HIV DNA in clinical samples by qPCR (2017) Sci Rep 7(1):1209. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-01221-5