There are HIV-infected immune cells that can clone themselves and persist over many years despite antiretroviral treatment, Medical Xpress reports. Publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers studied a single African-American man who was diagnosed with HIV in 2000 and died of cancer 13 years after starting treatment for the virus.

The researchers found that HIV-infected CD4 cells—they do not know which subtypes—can clone themselves along with viable, replication-competent virus. In other words, the new cells can replicate and produce new virus that would ultimately drive up the viral load if ARVs were discontinued.

This information is a useful guide for future research in the HIV cure arena and efforts to eliminate the viral reservoir. But the study’s findings also highlight the extreme difficulty of ridding the body of all virus when a single infected cell has the capacity to reproduce a population of infected cells.

To read the Medical Xpress article, click here.

To read the study abstract, click here.