HIV Resistance Meeting Web Reports

Each summer there is a small, invitation-only International Workshop on HIV Drug Resistance and Treatment Strategies; this year the 5th workshop in this series was held June 4-8, 2001 in Scottsdale, Arizona. Recently, a 9,000-word detailed technical report of this meeting, written by leading HIV researcher Daniel R. Kuritzkes, M.D., was published on Medscape: http://hiv.medscape.com.

This report should be read by HIV-specialist physicians and other medical professionals; most patients will find it difficult, but may want to scan it to look for any information that might be relevant to their treatment.

Dr. Kuritzkes summarized the highlights "perhaps of most immediate relevance to day-to-day clinical practice":

• Y318F is a newly recognized mutation associated with NNRTI resistance.
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• Treatment-naive patients with novel mutations at 215 are at risk for rapid selection of resistance to zidovudine.

• Data continue to confirm that stavudine and zidovudine are cross-resistant.

• Presence of mutations at codons 82, 54, and 10 together with four additional PI resistance mutations is significantly associated with failure of lopinavir/ritonavir.

• Ritonavir boosting of indinavir may partially overcome indinavir resistance.

• Resistance mutations confer a loss of viral fitness relative to wild-type, but the clinical significance of this remains unclear.

• The CCTG 575 study failed to show a benefit from phenotyping in guiding the selection of a salvage regimen, except in the subgroup of patients with virus resistant to more than 3 protease inhibitors at baseline.

• The benefits and risks of treatment interruptions are still under investigation, but risks may include emergence of lamivudine resistance.

• The majority of zidovudine- and abacavir-resistant viruses remain susceptible to tenofovir, although cross-resistance is observed in virus with multi-NRTI resistance.

• New technologies to assess resistance to entry inhibitors such as T-20 and T-1249 are in development.

The abstracts and other reports from the meeting may be available through http://www.intmedpress.com (after a complicated registration procedure).

Other reports are can be found at:

• http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/2001conf/hivresis/main.html

• http://www.natap.org/2001/5thresist/ndx5thresist.htm

ISSN # 1052-4207

Copyright 2001 by John S. James. Permission granted for noncommercial reproduction, provided that our address and phone number are included if more than short quotations are used.

Back to the AIDS Treatment News July 13, 2001 contents page.