Variational Autoencoder-enabled High-throughput Drug Screening for HIV Latency Modulators predicted through Noise in Gene Expression

09 Jul 20264 min read0 viewsVerified Feed

GIST (Key Takeaways)

Due to its ability to establish a pool of undetectable and latently infected cells that can initiate viral production through random reactivation, a cure to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections has remained elusive. Many approaches have been proposed, including the "shock and kill" method where latency reversing agents (LRAs) are administered to reactivate latently infected cells out of latency and remove them through immune targeting and clearance, and the "block and lock" method where latency promoting agents (LPAs) are administered to inhibit reactivation and potentially induce a "deep latency" state where infected cells can no longer reactivate.
Previous large scale drug screen studies have demonstrated a correlation between a compound's capability to modulate the fluctuations (or "noise") in HIV gene expression and its potential to modulate HIV latency. However, measurements of gene expression noise are labor- and cost-intensive.
To circumvent these drawbacks, we trained a variational autoencoder (VAE) on a previously published large scale time-lapse fluorescence microscopy dataset, and performed an in silico screening of ~175,000 compounds for HIV latency modulators.

Clinical Editorial

bioRxiv (Biomedical Preprints) published a clinical update in Research Highlights on 09 Jul 2026.

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