AEGiS-06IAC: Quantitation of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in seropositive patients at different stages of disease.

6th International AIDS Conference

San Francisco, California, USA — June 20-23, 1990

Quantitation of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in seropositive patients at different stages of disease.

Int Conf AIDS 1990 Jun 20-23; 6:341 (abstract no. 1108)
VedBrat SS, Pierce P, Hellman KB; Braton Biotech Inc., Rockville, Md., USA

OBJECTIVE: Medical devices coming in contact with body fluids during routine patient care may be vectors of HIV transmission. To assess this risk, it is important to determine HIV levels in body fluids of seropositive individuals. HIV levels were quantified in blood samples from 90 seropositive individuals at different stages of HIV disease by determining levels of HIV p24 antigen in plasma and frequency of infected peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs).

METHODS: Levels of HIV p24 in plasma and cocultures of patient PBMCs with normals, was determined by antigen capture (AC) assays. Frequency of HIV infected cells was determined by titration of PBMCs in multiple coculture experiments using improved coculture techniques.

RESULTS: Replicating HIV could be detected in more than 95% of the clinical blood samples irrespective of the stage of the disease and in majority of cases within 3-7 days of coculture. This represents a significant improvement of virus isolation technique over the previous reports. Using this approach, frequency of HIV infected cells was found to range from 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 324 PBMCs. Titration of whole blood, instead of PBMCs, was done in one coculture experiment in which even the lowest dose of 10ul of blood tested was found to be infectious. AZT treatment of patients has no effect on the ability to isolate HIV from PBMC cocultures and some HIV isolates were found to be non-cytopathic.

Keywords: AEGIS, HIV, HIV Core Protein p24, HIV Infections, Zidovudine, HIV Antigens, Plasma, Human, blood, ICA6

900620
1108