Question

Can someone with a resistant strain of virus be treated?

28 April 2008. Related: All topics, Resistance.

My friend has been infected with drug resistant strain of virus. Now does this mean he can not be treated any more?

Answer

Answer: Simon Collins

It depends on what your friend is resistant to. His/her doctor will do a test to check for that. The test is called genotype resistance test. It detects whether the virus has any changes on its surface. Those changes are called mutations and some of them are responsible for the medications not working. Different mutations are responsible for resistance to different medications.

Some people can be resistant only to one medication, while others can be resistant to many or whole classes. Unfortunately, there are also people who are multi-class resistant. Their treatment is very difficult, but not impossible, especially keeping in mind that nowadays there are newer classes of antiretrovirals like integrase inhibitors and CCR5 inhibitors.

Your friend needs to talk to the doctor, find out to which exactly medications s/he is resistant and then construct a regiment that will work for him/her. In order to get good results from the genotype resistance test, s/he needs to have 1000 copies of viral load (according to the guidelines), but some labs may do the test with a lower viral load too.

The i-Base Guide to Changing Treatment contains lots of information about what to do if you have developed resistance to some or all of your HIV drugs.