( University of Pennsylvania researchers ...)Highly Effective Method for Screening Drug-resistant Forms of HIV Developed,Health

University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a new method for screening drug-resistance forms of HIV that saves both time and money.

Dr. Frederic D. Bushman, Professor of Microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, combined two genetic tests, which enabled him to rapidly obtained gene sequences from multiple drug-resistant HIV samples at once.

"There is considerable interest in identifying minor drug resistant variants prior to initiating new therapy, in order to allow treatment with the most effective drugs," explains Dr. Bushman, whose study appears online in Nucleic Acids Research.

"Treatment of HIV infection often fails because viruses mutate to resist drugs. Under the pressure of drug treatment, small populations of resistant viruses can quickly grow to become the majority, resulting in treatment failure due to drug resistance," he adds.

Around 40 million people across the world are currently living with HIV/AIDS, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The commonly prescribed cocktails of antiretroviral drugs help slow the debilitating effects of the virus by disrupting it at various stages in its replication, but still quickly mutating forms of HIV can complicate treatment outcomes.

The researchers reckon that nearly 50 per cent of individuals being treated for HIV in the US carry drug-resistant forms of HIV, which was either caused by mutations in the virus in response to drug treatment or by infection with a resistant form of the virus. They feel that the increased availability of antiretroviral drugs to meet the HIV/AIDS needs of developing countries in recent years may lead to a global rise in drug-resistant strains of HIV.

"To overcome drug resistance, patients must be treated with drugs to which the HIV virus is still susceptible," says Bushman.

Due high costs of Antiretroviral resistance
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