The researchers developed a more sensitive way to find HIV drug resistance

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is an extremely active virus. Scientists already know that every day the virus copies itself billions of times in a patient's body, and in the process of copying it changes very subtly. In some patients, mutations of this virus may cause many of the viruses in those patients to become resistant to antiretroviral drugs used to prevent and treat AIDS.

Now researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina think they have created a very sensitive test for finding drug-resistant HIV. Dr. Charles Hicks, one of the participants in the study, said it is important for doctors to know when the patient has a drug-resistant virus in the body.

HIV develops from a human immune cell, a cell that the virus infects and uses to copy.

'What we know is that even if resistance is only present in a small number of viruses, it is very important for the drug to work or not, and so it can do it. change the way we choose treatments for patients ".

Dr Hicks noted that tests were available to help determine whether the patient had HIV drug resistance, but the tests were not sensitive enough. 'Currently, our standard test shows that if the virus you are looking for accounts for one fifth of the virus in all the viruses in the body, we can see that test is reliable. But the new test allows us to reduce to a lower rate, in more detail, maybe 1/1000, which is definitely down to 1/100, and this is clearly a big improvement over the scale. 1/5.

Dr. Hicks said it was important to know if the patient had HIV drug resistance as soon as possible. Patients with resistant viruses will gradually become more ill, but doctors may change the medication they prescribe to prevent this condition.

Hicks said that in addition, patients with resistant viruses can transmit these more powerful viruses to others. This is a major problem in the United States and Europe, where HIV patients have been treated with antiretroviral drugs for nearly a decade. He recognized this clearly in his research. 'In North Carolina where we are conducting research on the prevalence of drug resistance in people who are currently newly infected, we found that more than 10% of newly infected people in 2006 and 2007 were infected. The virus is already resistant to some extent. '

Dr. Hicks and his research colleagues hope to improve their test further and will put it into clinical use over the next few years. He said that is important because as more and more people start taking antiretroviral drugs, scientists need tools to detect slowing down the spread of drug-resistant viruses.

Hong Linh