Alliance for Improved HIV Testing

Combining an HIV resistance test with an HIV-1 genotyping test allows doctors to make better management decisions about an HIV-infected patient's individual therapy. To this end, American Medical Laboratories, Inc. (AML, Chantilly, VA, USA) has entered into an agreement with Virco Lab, Inc. (Mechelen, Belgium) to provide Virco's VirtualPhenotype test to be marketed by AML with its own HIV-1 genotyping test.

HIV-1 phenotype analysis determines the ability of the virus to replicate in the presence of anti-retroviral drugs. The VirtualPhenotype is a rapid and cost-effective test to help predict the effectiveness of various HIV drug therapies. AML says it offers the only quantitative prediction of resistance from the genotype. After performing a traditional HIV genotyping assay, the resulting genotype data are used to query Virco's relational database of resistance information, with more than 100,000 genotypes and phenotypes. This produces a VirtualPhenotype. Thus, predictive phenotypic information is provided at a significant cost savings and in one-third the time needed to perform a traditional HIV-1 phenotype assay.

Having both the genotype and information from the VirtualPhenotype enables doctors to better manage an HIV-1 patient's individual therapy. AML will also offer Virco's phenotype test, the Antivirogram, which offers a direct measurement of resistance of each of the 15 HIV drugs currently on the market.




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