Silent, but deadly – eliminating reservoirs of latent HIV

HIV treatment with highly active anti-retroviral therapy cannot eliminate latent reservoirs of HIV. In a recent paper, Root and Hamer describe a novel targeting mechanism for killing HIV-infected cells. They show that 5-helix (a gp41-binding protein) fused to a Pseudomonas exotoxin fragment can selectively kill cells displaying envelope proteins on their surface from a broad range of HIV strains.