Sensitive Assay Detects HIV Mutants

AIDS researchers have developed a sensitive assay to detect the presence of drug-resistant strains of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the blood of patients undergoing treatment.

Investigators at Duke University Medical Center (Durham, NC, USA) developed a highly sensitive parallel allele-specific sequencing (PASS) assay to simultaneously analyze a large number of viral genomes. The assay was based on a sensitive method for detecting fluorescent markers that pinpointed sites of mutations in HIV's genes for reverse transcriptase and protease.

The test system was used to analyze 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 were not responding satisfactorily. Results published in the January 7, 2007, online edition of Nature. Methods revealed that the assay could detect a single mutated virus out of 10,000 non-mutated viruses in the patient samples (0.01%).

"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,” said senior author Dr. Feng Gao, associate professor of molecular virology at Duke University. "Thus, the assay may permit more accurate prediction of treatment outcomes. In addition, the test has 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.”



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