Whole Blood Transcriptional Response to Early Acute HIV. Homo sapiens

The objective of this study is to: 1) Characterize the transcriptional signature of early acute HIV infection. 2) Eucidate the evolution of the signature in both anti-retroviral treated and untreated populations over a 24 week time course. 3) Correlate clinical and disease related parameters to heterogenaity in the transcriptional signature to identify pathways explaining clinical heterogeneity 4) Compare the acute signature of HIV infection to other acute viral signatures. Overall design: 58 acute HIV patients were recruited from locations in Africa (n=43) and the United States (n=15). These patients were allocated into training (n=18), test (n=10) and validation sets (n=30). Patient samples were collected at study enrollment (confirmed acute) for all patients and at weeks 1,2,4,12,and 24 for training and test set constituents. 13 of 15 US patients initiated anti-retroviral therapy after after enollment and before the week 1 visit. The remining 2 US patients and 43 African patients were not placed on therapy through the 24 week time course. Matched uninfected controls patients were also recuited from each site (n= 55). In total 232 samples were collectd.