14th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, 25-28 February 2007, Los Angeles

24 April 2007. Related: Conference reports, Conference index, CROI 14 (Retrovirus) 2007.

The Annual CROI remains the most important HIV-focused medical conference, with many companies and researchers holding back data to present at this meeting. This year the meeting was held in downtown Los Angeles.

The meeting attracted almost 4000 attendees and included over 1000 abstracts with a programme that was particularly strong on new drugs including integrase inhibitors raltegravir and elvitegravir, the CCR5 inhibitor maraviroc, and NNRTIs etravirine and rilpivirine.

The CROI website now makes all key lectures and oral presentations available online, and includes online searchable free access to the abstracts from the meeting, and posts an increasing proportion of poster abstracts online in PDF format (though this is still only for a minority of the posters).

This broad access means that it is easy to see important trial results and overview lectures directly – this is better that through a community or medical journalist – and the questions and discussion at the end of each session are also included in these web presentations.

We encourage readers to find a few hours to follow some of this important material first hand.

As usual, we will include reports from this conference over several issues of HTB.

Studies covered in the issue include:

• Raltegravir (MK-0518) Phase 3 trials show successful viral suppression in multi-drug resistant patients

• Maraviroc Phase 2b/3 results in treatment experienced CCR5-tropic patients

• Phase 2 study of Gilead’s integrase inhibitor elvitegravir (GS-9137)

• Phase 2b study comparing rilpivirine (TMC-278) to efavirenz in treatment-naive patients: 48-week results

• PK results from heat-stable formulation of ritonavir

• Use of low-dose rapamycin, a CCR5 suppressant, to increase potency of T-20 in vitro

• Growth hormone release factor (TH9507) reduces central fat adiposity

• Further insight into risk and management of cardiovascular disease (CVD) from D:A:D cohort: no additional benefit of metabolic syndrome diagnosis; new HIV-specific CVD risk equations; increasing uptake of lipid lowering drugs but low smoking cessation

• Pregnancy outcomes in the DART trial

• 12 month response to HAART in women following exposure to prevention of mother to child transmission regimens

• Unexpectedly high rate of K65R mutation in patients failing first-line d4T-containing regimens in Thailand

• Sexual transmission of HCV in Brighton reported in HIV-positive and HIV-negative MSM

• Hepatitis B drug entecavir reported to have anti-HIV viral activity in three patients

• High 6-month rate of PML survival with aggressive use of 5-drug T-20-based ARV regimen

• Increased anal HPV levels in HV-positive smokers

• Clade-B HIV-1 infection in Haiti predates global subtype-B virus

• Drug interactions and pharmacokinetic studies: CROI 2007

• Unless stated otherwise, references are to the Programme and Abstracts for the 14th Conference on Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infections, available online. Webcasts (including slides) and podcasts are also available on the site.

Programme and abstracts

http://www.retroconference.org

Several other community organisations cover this meeting including:

National AIDS Treatment Advocacy Project

http://www.natap.org

HIV and Hepatitis.com

http://www.hivandhepatitis.com

Aids Map

http://www.aidsmap.com

An excellent set of non-technical interviews between treatment advocates and key researchers were recorded at the conference by IFARA.TV and are available online:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=croi+2007&hl=en