HIV Hideout

A killer T cell’s job is to eliminate virally-infected cells, but when it comes to HIV infection their ability to destroy is hindered. While blood can test negative, HIV can be ‘hidden’ in the body, particularly in the lymph node’s follicles – normally hubs of effective immune activity. With other viruses, killer T cells, having infiltrated follicles, will expunge infected cells using a toxic enzyme, granzyme B. Now researchers have discovered, using spatial transcriptomics (showing which cells’ genes are active in a tissue sample) in human HIV-infected lymph nodes, that in this setting killer Ts (shown in white) have low granzyme levels. It turns out that HIV influences interaction between a molecule on the killers, NKG2A, with its partner HLA-E on infected T follicular helper cells which reduces granzyme. HLA-E is normally a ‘destroy me’ signal but when bound to NKG2A, killer T cell destructive activity is suppressed. Exploiting this vulnerability may be key to how HIV survives.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Andrea O. Papadopoulos & Leonard Mvaya, and colleagues
• Africa Health Research Institute, Durban, South Africa; Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Research Programme, Blantyre, Malawi
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Cell Reports, September 2025