Selection of epigenetically privileged HIV-1 proviruses during treatment with panobinostat and interferon-a2a [RNA-seq]
CD4 T cells with latent HIV-1 infection persist despite treatment with currently available antiretroviral agents and represent the main barrier to a cure of HIV-1 infection. Pharmacological disruption of viral latency may increase the immunological vulnerability of HIV-1-infected cells, but the clinical efficacy of latency-reversing agents for reducing HIV-1 persistence remains to be proven. Here, we show in a randomized, controlled human clinical trial that the histone deacetylase inhibitor panobinostat, when administered in combination with pegylated interferon-a2a, induces a structural transformation of the HIV-1 reservoir cell pool, characterized by a disproportionate overrepresentation of HIV-1 proviruses integrated in ZNF genes and in chromatin regions with reduced H3K27ac marks, the molecular target site for panobinostat. In contrast, proviruses near H3K27ac marks appeared to be actively selected against, likely due to increased susceptibility to panobinostat. These data suggest that latency-reversing treatment with panobinostat can accelerate immune selection of HIV-1 proviruses. Overall design: We performed RNA-seq on isolated CD4T cells from PBMCs of 17 study participants in the ACTIVATE clinical trial to study the transcriptional profile in response to the different study medications.