Infection with the AIDS virus has led to an expanding global health crisis, with over 45 million persons currently living with HIV infection. Ineffective immune control and resultant disease progression is a hallmark of this infection, despite the induction of vigorous virus-specific CD8 T cell responses in most infected persons. Although the features of protective immunity in HIV infection remain to be defined, growing evidence points to a critical role for virus-specific CD4 cells. This is consistent with observations in murine models that maintenance of effective antiviral CTL responses in chronic viral infections is critically dependent on virus-specific T helper cells (1–8).
A potentially simple explanation for the lack of effective immune control in chronic HIV infection is that HIV selectively infects activated CD4 cells and thereby destroys the very cells being generated to coordinate the adaptive immune response (9...
