Elimination of latent HIV genome and its infected cells by CRISPR/Cas9 system / 中国人兽共患病学报

ABSTRACT

The incidence and mortality of AIDS have been decreasing after the adoption of combined antiretroviral therapy strategy in the world,then AIDS has become a manageable chronic infectious disease.But HIV/AIDS continues to be a major global public health problem since it is restricted by a variety of factors.The major reason for the persistence of HIV/AIDS is the inability of existing treatments to clear or eradicate the multiple HIV reservoirs that exist in the human body.To suppress the virus replication and rebound,HIV/AIDS patients must take life-long antiviral medications.A few years ago,the clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated nuclease 9 (Cas9)system has been developed as a simple,fast and easy to operate gene-editing technique.Several studies in HIV infected cells and/or in animal models have shown that the system has the potential to eliminate or disrupt HIV-integrated genome or HIV-infected cells from multiple HIV reservoirs,which may result in the complete cure of HIV/AIDS.This paper analyzes the results of CRISPR/CAS9 in the elimination of latent HIV,and discusses the possible problems and trends.