HIV-1 Rebound Virus Consists of a Small Number of Lineages That Entered the Reservoir Close to ART Initiation

Abstract

HIV-1 persists as a latent reservoir during suppressive antiretroviral therapy (ART). Viral rebound occurs upon ART interruption, posing a challenge to cure efforts. Characterizing viral populations fuelling rebound is imperative to curing HIV-1. We used longitudinal samples collected pretherapy from women in the CAPRISA 002 cohort to create an evolutionary time- line to determine the pretherapy timepoint when the rebound virus originally entered the long- lived reservoir. Participants (N=10) were untreated for an average of 5 years then on ART for an average of 2 years before viral rebound (defined as >1000 RNA copies/ml). env sequences were used to characterize the longitudinal pre-ART evolving viral RNA population, the proviral DNA reservoir during ART, and viral RNA in the plasma during rebound. For each participant, between 1 and 3 major viral lineages were identified in the plasma during rebound. A total of 20 rebound virus lineages were examined for the 10 participants, and 19 were found to have entered the reservoir around the time of therapy initiation. The one lineage estimated to enter the reservoir more than a year before therapy was observed in a participant who was untreated for more than 8 years, yet retained moderate CD4 T cell counts. Analysis of the viral DNA reservoir, from which the rebound viruses emanated, revealed that while 95% of rebounding lineages dated to the year before ART initiation, only 61% of unique proviruses dated to that time period. Strikingly, for three participants with DNA reservoirs dominated by viruses from earlier in untreated infection, only 33% of unique proviruses dated to the year before ART initiation, yet 83% of rebounding lineages dated to that time. Our results show that rebound virus almost exclusively comes from the portion of the latent reservoir that formed around the time of therapy initiation, even when the reservoir is composed of diverse sequences from across the pre-ART time period. Author SummaryHIV-1 is maintained in a long-lived reservoir during suppressive therapy. Virus rebounds if therapy is discontinued. We found that in most cases rebound virus comes from a pool of viral sequences that entered the long-lived reservoir around the time of therapy initiation. While the viral DNA reservoir is on average also skewed toward sequences replicating around the time of therapy initiation, the rebound virus almost exclusively comes from this portion of the latent reservoir, even when the reservoir contained proviruses from much earlier in untreated infection. Thus, we hypothesize that there are features of the viruses forming the latent reservoir around the time of therapy initiation, or features of the host at that time, that select these viruses as initiators of rebound during therapy discontinuation.