Dear Dr. MH Merry Christmas and Happy new year!

Here, I want to ask you another question about detecting the new strain of HIV. In your privous post, you ever saying that "Truly HIV-1 infected, with relatively advanced disease, but a strain of virus that is not quantifiable by viral load tests" I read a paper saying that: "As for detecting virus in this situation(some new strains which Elisa & WB can't detect), a standard HIV culture is likely to be negative. What would be more useful would be a highly sensitive, CD8 depleted culture.This is the test that Bob Silicano and others used to show that the reservoir does not go away." Do you think the "CD8 depleted culture" is a definitive method to detect new HIV strain? Can the culture be available in normal hospital?

Thanks!

Best regards!

Mike

HIV culture in general is not available in hospital or even in alot of commercial labs. CD8 depletion will remove certain suppressive effects that limit growing HIV in culture, but that is generally required to coax very small amounts of infectious virus out. That is not the problem with strains that have a different genetic makeup that conventional PCR tests cannot detect. There is usually abundant virus around. MH