I don't know on why some people think it OK to abuse people. These people seem far too emotionally attached to their investment in BIT.
HIV kills CD4 (T4) cells (and macrophages). In untreated HIV infected people the CD4 cell count declines over time and when it gets below 200 T4 cells / µl then you are considered to have AIDS [1].
T4 cell activation is the process in which a resting CD4 cell is exposed to an antigen via an antigen presenting cell and starts the process of proliferation. You can measure how many T4 cells are activated which gives you some idea of how much inflammation the immune system has at a given point in time.
The problem for BIT is they really have no idea of what may be activating the T4 cells. They certainly don't have any data that it HIV, although this is a reasonable hypothesis (Figure 3).
More fundamentally immune activation is a bad thing in HIV. Quoting from a recent review on this [3].
Fully supporting the important contribution of HIV replication, immune activation and inflammation correlate with the level of viremia and are significantly lower in HIV-infected patients who control viral replication spontaneously (HIC) or by HAART.
The higher levels of T4 cell activation is not a good thing and suggests that BIT225 is interfering with the action of Atripla to control HIV replication and reduce immune activation. This also fits the data observed with the plasma viral load where the BIT225 treated patients had around 2.5x higher levels of HIV RNA in their blood than those just given Atripla.
If BIT225 was doing any good the patients should have lower levels of T4 cell activation not higher!
I should add that the error bars are so large that the whole effect could just be due to noise and measurement error.
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