Review Article

Copyright © 2012 Jean-Philippe Herbeuval et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Despite variability, the majority of HIV-1-infected individuals progress to AIDS characterized by high viral load andmassive CD4+ T-cell depletion. However, there is a subset of HIV-1-positive individuals that does not progress and spontaneously maintains an undetectable viral load. This infrequent patient population is defined as HIV-1 controllers (HIV controllers), and represents less than 1 % of HIV-1-infected patients. HIV-1-specific CD4+ T cells and the pool of central memory CD4+ T cells are also preserved despite immune activation due to HIV-1 infection. The majority of HIV controllers are also defined by the absence of massive CD4+ T-cell depletion, even after 10 years of infection. However, the mechanisms involved in protection against HIV-1 disease progression have not been elucidated yet. Controllers represent a heterogeneous population; we describe in this paper some common characteristics concerning innate immune response and CD4+ T cells of HIV controllers. 1. Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cells The innate immune system is our first line of defense against invadingmicroorganisms while the adaptive immune system acts as a second line of defense and also afford