Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
March 19, 2024, 02:34:05 am

Login with username, password and session length


Members
Stats
  • Total Posts: 772784
  • Total Topics: 66296
  • Online Today: 267
  • Online Ever: 5484
  • (June 18, 2021, 11:15:29 pm)
Users Online
Users: 0
Guests: 197
Total: 197

Welcome


Welcome to the POZ Community Forums, a round-the-clock discussion area for people with HIV/AIDS, their friends/family/caregivers, and others concerned about HIV/AIDS.  Click on the links below to browse our various forums; scroll down for a glance at the most recent posts; or join in the conversation yourself by registering on the left side of this page.

Privacy Warning:  Please realize that these forums are open to all, and are fully searchable via Google and other search engines. If you are HIV positive and disclose this in our forums, then it is almost the same thing as telling the whole world (or at least the World Wide Web). If this concerns you, then do not use a username or avatar that are self-identifying in any way. We do not allow the deletion of anything you post in these forums, so think before you post.

  • The information shared in these forums, by moderators and members, is designed to complement, not replace, the relationship between an individual and his/her own physician.

  • All members of these forums are, by default, not considered to be licensed medical providers. If otherwise, users must clearly define themselves as such.

  • Forums members must behave at all times with respect and honesty. Posting guidelines, including time-out and banning policies, have been established by the moderators of these forums. Click here for “Do I Have HIV?” posting guidelines. Click here for posting guidelines pertaining to all other POZ community forums.

  • We ask all forums members to provide references for health/medical/scientific information they provide, when it is not a personal experience being discussed. Please provide hyperlinks with full URLs or full citations of published works not available via the Internet. Additionally, all forums members must post information which are true and correct to their knowledge.

  • Product advertisement—including links; banners; editorial content; and clinical trial, study or survey participation—is strictly prohibited by forums members unless permission has been secured from POZ.

To change forums navigation language settings, click here (members only), Register now

Para cambiar sus preferencias de los foros en español, haz clic aquí (sólo miembros), Regístrate ahora

Finished Reading This? You can collapse this or any other box on this page by clicking the symbol in each box.

Author Topic: New HIV Test May Predict Drug Resistance  (Read 3446 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline trellium

  • Member
  • Posts: 95
  • stArk raving Borg
New HIV Test May Predict Drug Resistance
« on: January 08, 2007, 01:04:29 am »
".... about 1,000 times more sensitive than the most widely used assays on the market for detecting drug-resistant HIV viruses"

From Duke University Medical Center News (01/07/2007)
http://www.dukemednews.duke.edu/news/article.php?id=9985

New HIV Test May Predict Drug Resistance


DURHAM, N.C. -- Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have developed a highly sensitive test for identifying which drug-resistant strains of HIV are harbored in a patient's bloodstream.

The test may provide physicians with a tool to guide patient treatment by predicting if a patient is likely to become resistant to a particular HIV drug, said one of its developers, Feng Gao, M.D., associate professor of medicine. Drug resistance is one of the most common reasons why therapy for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, fails.

The test, which detects genetic changes, or mutations, in HIV, also may help scientists understand how the constantly evolving virus develops drug resistance, Gao said. He said such knowledge ultimately may result in the development of new treatments designed to evade resistance.

The findings will appear online on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2007, in the journal Nature Methods, as well as in the journal's February 2007 print edition. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Duke Center for AIDS Research.

Duke has filed for a provisional patent on the technology, and the Duke Office of Licensing & Ventures is considering various options to commercialize this technology.

Because HIV genes mutate so easily and the virus reproduces so rapidly, most people who are infected have many different forms of the virus in their bodies. In some cases, mutated strains take on new properties that make them more resistant to the drugs used in antiretroviral therapy, the primary means of treatment for HIV infection.

During antiretroviral therapy that does not fully suppress the virus, a strain that develops drug resistance will grow more quickly than strains lacking such resistance, and the resistant strain will replicate to become the most prominent virus in the person's body.

"The viral populations found in the blood of one patient can be very different from the populations present in another," Gao said. "Which resistant viruses are at hand can have important implications for the successful treatment of that patient."

More than 20 drugs currently are available for treating HIV infection. All but one of the drugs target two of the genes that serve as blueprints for vital protein components of HIV: reverse transcriptase and protease.

The Duke test examines the genes of HIV strains for mutations at certain positions that are known to be linked to drug resistance. For example, a change at a specific spot along the genetic code -- position 46 -- of the protease gene results in resistance to the drug indinavir.

To assess the test, the researchers analyzed blood samples from three different groups of HIV patients: those who had never received antiretroviral treatment, those who had received treatment but were not currently being treated and those who were receiving treatment but the treatment was not completely successful.

After processing the blood samples and isolating the genetic material in each of them, the researchers added tiny fluorescent tags designed to stick to HIV genes in particular ways. Tags designed to stick to mutated gene locations known to produce drug resistance were labeled to appear green, while tags designed to stick to the same gene locations but where the genes had not mutated were labeled to appear red.

The researchers used a sophisticated computer program to count the number of molecules with green or red fluorescent tags in each sample. The test proved sensitive enough to detect a single mutated virus out of 10,000 nonmutated viruses in the patient samples, Gao said.

"This level of sensitivity makes the assay about 1,000 times more sensitive than the most widely used assays on the market for detecting drug-resistant HIV viruses" Gao said. "Thus, the assay may permit more accurate prediction of treatment outcomes."

The test also can detect when a virus molecule has more than one mutation, a capability that no commercially available test has achieved, Gao said. This capability may prove critical for detecting HIV strains that have become resistant to multiple drugs, a condition that occurs often as many patients are treated with many drugs at the same time.

The test may find broader medical application as well, Gao said. He said it has the potential to detect mutations that confer drug resistance in infectious agents that cause other diseases besides HIV, such as hepatitis B, hepatitis C and tuberculosis.

Other researchers participating in the study were Fangping Cai, Haifeng Chen, Charles B. Hicks, John A. Bartlett and Jun Zhu.


 


Terms of Membership for these forums
 

© 2024 Smart + Strong. All Rights Reserved.   terms of use and your privacy
Smart + Strong® is a registered trademark of CDM Publishing, LLC.