Washington, Jan. 8: Scientists at Duke University Medical Centre have developed a highly sensitive test for identifying drug resistant strains of HIV, which are harbored in a patient’s bloodstream.
Dr. Feng Gao, Associate Professor of medicine, says that the newly developed test can predict whether a patient is likely to become resistant to a particular HIV drug, and thereby provide doctors with a tool to guide treatment.
He believes that the test may also help scientists understand how the constantly evolving virus develops drug resistance, the knowledge that ultimately may result in the development of new treatments designed to evade resistance.
Gao also revealed that Duke University had filed for a provisional patent on the technology, and that the researchers were considering ways to establish a new company to pursue its development, or to license the technology to an existing company.
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.
They added tiny fluorescent tags designed to stick to HIV genes in particular ways, that is, tags designed to stick to mutated gene locations known to produce drug resistance, and those designed to stick to the same gene locations but where the genes had not mutated.
The researchers found the test sensitive enough to detect a single mutated virus out of 10,000 non-mutated 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. Thus, the assay may permit more accurate prediction of treatment outcomes," Gao said.
He claimed that the test could also detect when a virus molecule has more than one mutation, a capability that no commercially available test has achieved, and which may prove critical for detecting HIV strains that have become resistant to multiple drugs.
Gao further said that the test had 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.
The study has been published in the journal Nature Methods. (ANI)