Fig 6. HIV-specific Tregs decrease after IL-2 treatment and positively correlate with viral load after treatment interruption.

(A) Gating strategy used for detecting HIV-specific CD4⁺CD25⁺CD134⁺CD39⁺FoxP3⁺ Tregs after p24 stimulation using the “OX40 assay”. (B, D and F) HIV-specific CD4⁺CD25⁺CD134⁺CD39⁺FoxP3⁺ Tregs percentages in patients at wk0 and wk36 using the gating strategy shown in (A). (C, E and G) Correlations between %CD4⁺CD25⁺CD134⁺CD39⁺FoxP3⁺ Tregs at wk36 and viral load at resuming ART. Correlations were calculated using spearman correlation coefficients (Prism 5.0, version 5.0d). P values were considered significant when < 0.05.