Results from a recent computational study indicate that when a treatment fails, intermediate steps should be taken to temporarily reduce the viral load before switching to a new regimen. Starting treatment at a lower viral load was found to significantly lower the chances of developing resistance to the new regimen.

The researchers also found that for people with multiple failed therapies, constructing a temporary ‘mix and match’ regimen from previously failed regimens before switching to a new one may be the best approach for minimizing the risk of further treatment…

Results from a recent study in San Francisco suggest that the rates of new HIV diagnoses and transmitted drug resistance have remained stable from 2004 to 2006. The results also show that nearly 60 percent of drug-resistant HIV variants seen in newly diagnosed individuals are resistant to non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors.

“The study findings highlight the importance of conducting drug resistance testing at the time of HIV diagnosis in order to guide treatment decisions,” said Dr. Hong-Ha Truong, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and…

Results from a large European study indicate that people with multi-drug resistant HIV have had an improved response to antiretrovirals and a decreased rate of AIDS since 2000, likely due to the introduction of newer antiretroviral drugs that are more effective and easier to use.

“The positive trends we reported between 2000 and 2009 in this study probably result from improvements in tolerability and ease of use of drug regimens, and in the availability of drugs with non-overlapping resistance profiles,” wrote the study authors.

“Our results are consistent with recent…

An analysis of HIV drug resistance tests over the past seven years indicates that the percentage of HIV strains that are resistant to all three major classes of antiretroviral drugs has dropped since 2007.

The drop was driven primarily by a decrease in the number of HIV strains that were resistant to protease inhibitors.

The results were presented Sunday by the company Monogram Biosciences, which conducts HIV resistance testing, at the 51st Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in Chicago.

“These changes in the resistance pattern of patients…

Results from a recent small Spanish study indicate that a more sensitive technique for detecting drug resistance, called deep sequencing, more accurately identified drug resistance in HIV-positive individuals who had previously been treated with antiretrovirals and were suffering from drug failure.

“Our study suggests that more sensitive genotypic HIV drug resistance assays, such as deep HIV sequencing, may help clinicians design antiretroviral treatment combinations better suited for [patients] infected with multidrug-resistant viruses,” said Dr. Roger Paredes, a key investigator of the study, in correspondence with The AIDS Beacon.

“Deep sequencing…