HIV-1 Vpr Increases HCV Replication through VprBP in Cell Culture

5^th World Congress on Control and Prevention of HIV/AIDS, STDs & STIs

June 19-20, 2017 London, UK

Rongge Yang, Yanling Yan, Fang Huang, Ting Yuan and Binlian Sun

Institute of Virology,China

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J AIDS Clin Res

Abstract :

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) coinfection with hepatitis C virus (HCV) is associated with an increased HCV RNA level, as well as a more rapid progression to cirrhosis and end-stage liver disease. However, the mechanism underlying this effect is largely unknown. Here, we investigated the role of HIV-1 Vpr in HCV infection and clearly demonstrated that Vpr increased the replication of both the infectious HCV full-length genome and the subgenomic replicon. We also demonstrated that Vpr increased HCV infection by enhancing RNA replication but not viral entry or translation. Further, we showed that Vpr could partially overcome the anti-HCV effect of PEG-IFN. Our findings not only partially explain the clinical observation that patients coinfected with HIV and HCV have higher levels of HCV RNA and viral load than HCV mono-infected patients but also provide important information for HCV treatment in HIV/HCV coinfected patients.

Biography :

Dr. Yang was graduated from China Medical University with Bachelor Degree in Public Health, China. In 1999, he obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. in Microbiology in Yamanashi Medical University, Japan.

Dr. Yang has been doing HIV/AIDS research for many years, especially on genovariation and recombination of HIV in China. Dr. Yang had conducted profound studies on HIV molecular epidemic in Yunnan Province of China and identified the 2nd generation HIV recombinant forms for the first time, which revealed the mechanism of prevalent recombinants in China and illuminated the prevalent rules of CRF08_BC. Besides, Dr. Yang successfully cloned the infectious HIV epidemic strain and analyzed its biologic characteristics. All these findings were published in journals such as “AIDS”, “J Virol”, “J AIDS”, etc; and the articles were cited for more than 150 times. Findings in Yunnan also were awarded the second prized of “2006 Yunnan Provincial Natural Scientific Award”.

Email: ryang@wh.iov.cn