AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, December 13, 2004
Staff Medical Writers

"Drug resistance testing provides useful information for managing HIV-infected patients. Phenotyping could add complementary information to genotyping and occasionally be more useful, although is less available to clinicians.

"Large paired geno-pheno databases have allowed the prediction of phenotypes from genotypes. However, the accuracy of these virtual phenotypes (vPT) in a clinical setting has not been well assessed yet, "scientists writing in the Journal of Virological Methods report.

"We analyzed the concordance between vPT and interpreted genotype (GT) in 105 samples belonging to treatment-experienced HIV-infected patients. A high concordance was seen when examining both non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTI) and protease inhibitors (PI) (r=0.95 either), while it was lower for nucleoside analogs (r=0.79)," said O. Gallego and coworkers.

"The drugs with lower concordance were abacavir (71.1%), tenofovir (71.5%) and didanosine (71.9%). In 20% of specimens (21/105)," the authors continued, "the vPT did not provide results for all approved drugs. These were mainly samples with a high number of drug resistance mutations or rare genotypes, which seem to be underepresented in the VircoNET database."

"Overall, there is good correlation between vPT/GT, especially for PI and NNRTI. The inclusion of additional sequences in the VircoNET(TM) database, mainly those derived from heavily treatment-experienced patients and/or from patients failing the most recently approved drugs might improve its performance," suggested investigatgors.

Gallego and colleagues published their study in the Journal of Virological Methods (Correlation between rules-based interpretation and virtual phenotype interpretation of HIV-1 genotypes for predicting drug resistance in HIV-infected individuals. J Virol Methods. 2004 Oct;121(1):115-8.

Additional information can be obtained by contacting V. Soriano, Hospital Carlos 3, Infection Diseases Service, Madrid, Spain.

The publisher of the Journal of Virological Methods can be contacted at: Elsevier Science BV, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The information in this article comes under the major subject areas of HIV/AIDS, Drug Resistance, Virtual Phenotype, HIV Genotype and Biotechnology.

This article was prepared by AIDS Weekly editors from staff and other reports.

Reference

Gallego O, Martin-Carbonero L, Aguero J, et al., "Correlation between rules-based interpretation and virtual phenotype interpretation of HIV-1 genotypes for predicting drug resistance in HIV-infected individuals", J Virol Methods. 2004 Oct;121(1):115-8.

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