Cell-associated HIV-RNA as a superior marker of treatment success or failure Instituut voor Tropische Geneeskunde
Linos Vandekerckhove, Guido Vanham
The goal of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) in HIV infected individuals is to suppress viral replication. The biomarker that is traditionally used to measure this replication is the concentration of free virions in blood plasma (viral load, VL). In most treatment adherent patients VL is suppressed to levels below the limit of detection (LOD) of current commercial assays (i.e. <20 copies/ml) (1). Nevertheless, even when VL is ...