Exhaustion Of HIV-specific T Cells May Be Caused By Chronic Exposure To Virus

The "exhaustion" of immune cells that target HIV appears to result from chronic exposure to the virus, specifically exposure to the protein segments targeted by the pathogen-killing HIV-specific CD8 T cells. A study from researchers at the Partners AIDS Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital may have answered a key question: whether the functional impairment of these T cells is the cause or the result of unchecked viral replication in chronic progressive HIV-1 infection?