Research team includes three Indian Americans.
A group of researchers, including Indian Americans, from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, has developed an HIV test that could detect hidden traces of the virus.
A report, published online by Nature Medicine on Monday, said the test is sensitive enough to detect even the inactive virus lying in immune cells. It is reportedly less expensive than the current tests.
The new test only requires a small blood volume. It is faster, less labor intensive and also can be readily adapted to a high-throughput format.
The research team includes Indian American scientists Anwesha Sanyal, Narasimhan J Venkatachari and Phalguni Gupta. Other team members are Robbie B Mailliard, Charles R Rinaldo, Deena Ratner, Ming Ding, Yue Chen, Jennifer M Zerbato, Nicholas S Giacobbi, , Bruce K Patterson, Amanda Chargin, Nicolas Sluis-Cremer
The test, in trial runs, revealed that the amount of virus lurking dormant in people who seems to be almost cured of HIV is about 70-fold larger than previous estimates.
The new test, called TZA by researchers, works by detecting a gene that is active only when replicating HIV is present. The TZA test result will be available within a week and at a third of the cost.
“Globally there are substantial efforts to cure people of HIV by finding ways to eradicate this latent reservoir of virus that stubbornly persists in patients, despite our best therapies,†Dr Phalguni Gupta, professor and vice chair of Pitt Public Health’s Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, said in a press release issued by the University of Pittsburgh. “But those efforts aren’t going to progress if we don’t have tests that are sensitive and practical enough to tell doctors if someone is truly cured.”
HIV infects vital cells in the human systems such as helper T cells (specifically CD4+ cells), macrophages, and dendritic cells. HIV infection leads to low levels of CD4+ T cells through a number of mechanisms, including pyroptosis of abortively infected T cells, apoptosis of uninfected bystander cells, direct viral killing of infected cells, and killing of infected CD4+ T cells by CD8 cytotoxic lymphocytes that recognize infected cells. When CD4+ T cell numbers decline below a critical level, cell-mediated immunity is lost, and the human body becomes progressively more susceptible to opportunistic infections.