Gene therapy as a cure for human immunodeficiency virus

Abstract

Despite the major successes of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), HIV cannot be cured and treatment needs to be taken life-long. The major barrier to a cure is the persistence of long-lived latently infected T cells, residual replication and anatomical reservoirs. Gene therapy is a strategy that is currently being pursued as one approach to achieve either a sterilising cure (elimination of all infected cells and detectable HIV RNA) or functional cure (long-term control of HIV replication in the absence of cART). Potential targets for gene therapy include CC chemokine receptor-5 (CCR5) (to make cells resistant to infection), HIV and cellular genes or proteins (to limit virus replicati..