Illuminating lymphoid tissue HIV reservoirs: advanced assays and their relevance to achieving an HIV cure.

Overview

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Persistent HIV reservoirs within lymphoid tissues represent a major obstacle to achieving an HIV cure. This review examines current and emerging assays used to visualize, characterize, and quantify these reservoirs. Recent advancements in imaging, sequencing, and single-cell technologies are providing unprecedented detail about the composition, landscape and behavior of HIV reservoirs. RECENT FINDINGS: Innovative assays, including intravital microscopy, spatial transcriptomics, next-generation sequencing, and highly multiplexed single-cell analyses, are revealing the complex interplay between the virus and the host immune system within lymphoid tissues. These methods are uncovering the heterogeneity of the latent reservoir, identifying specific cellular and molecular markers of viral persistence, and providing a more nuanced understanding of latency reversal dynamics. SUMMARY: Advancements in visualizing and characterizing HIV reservoirs are crucial for the development and evaluation of novel cure interventions. By providing a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying viral persistence, these assays can inform the design and measure the effectiveness of targeted therapies aimed at eliminating or permanently silencing the reservoir.