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I'm Eugenia Vispo from Spain.

Can you walk us through your study?

The thing that we found is that there is an interaction between abacavir [ABC, Ziagen] and ribavirin [Copegus, Rebetol], influencing that in the sustained virological response [SVR], response to the SVR. But the problem is that this influence is only when the levels of ribavirin at week 4, are below the cut-off that we have found to be related with SVR. When levels of ribavirin are below 2.2 micrograms per milliliter at week 4, there is an influence of abacavir use on SVR. But when the levels of ribavirin are over 2.2, there's not an influence of abacavir. And this is all adjusted for other factors, influence like genotype, HCV [hepatitis C], viral load, and all that.

We hypothesize that since they are both nucleoside analogs and they share enzyme pathways, maybe there's an influence, an interaction, between both of them. We don't know because you can only make sure of this in in vitro experiments We are studying that, but we don't have results yet.

Can you talk a little bit about your study population?

It's 438 patients. It's a multicenter Spanish study. And they were retrospectively analyzed.

How did they break down by gender?

They are near 80 percent males and 20 percent females.

And what would you say are the clinical implications of this study?

We don't know. It's very difficult, because we are talking about a drug that is rarely used in HIV-positive patients. Those are our results, but I think that we have to further investigate all that with many patients, with a population with more patients.

Thank you very much.

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