The virus-specific CD4+ T cell dysfunction associated with failure to control chronic infections is poorly understood in humans. In this study we sought to determine transcriptional signatures that link HIV-specific T cell help to viral control by performing genome wide transcriptional analysis on ex vivo stimulated HIV-specific CD4+ T cells from HIV-infected subjects with diverse viral loads, who were not on antiretroviral therapy at time of sampling.
Overall design
HIV-specific CD4 T cells were live-sorted after a 9-h stimulation of PBMCs with an HIV Gag peptide pool based on coupregulation of activation markers CD40L and CD69. The HIV-infected individuals were categorized in 3 groups: “Chronic progressors (CP) (n=11), defined as people with a viral load of more than 5,000 vRNA copies per ml of plasma; viremic controllers (VC) (n=9), defined as individuals with more than 50 and less than 5,000 vRNA per ml plasma; and elite controllers (EC) (n=12), defined as subjects who spontaneously controlled viremia to below 50 RNA copies per ml plasma in the absence of therapy.
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