New Strategy to Rapidly Assess Efficacy of AIDS Drugs in Children

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

New Strategy to Rapidly Assess Efficacy of AIDS Drugs in Children

Infectious Disease News (11/98) Vol. 11, No. 11, P. 22

Scientists from the National Cancer Institute have found a method that may be able to predict whether the use of ritonavir in children will be successful after only the first week of treatment. The researchers, led by Dr. Brigitta Mueller, now at Harvard Medical School, used pre-treatment levels of CD4 cells, HIV RNA in the blood, plasma drug concentration at the end of the first week of therapy, and the rate of virus elimination from the blood to accurately predict treatment success in almost 90 percent of the 41 children involved in the study. Senior author Dr. Dimiter Dimitrov explains, "The essence of our analysis is that only a combination of multiple parameters reflecting the function of the immune system, level of viral replication, and drug pharmacology contains sufficient information to robustly [predict] long-term treatment efficacy from short-term measurements." The authors note that the method may be useful in predicting the success of combination therapy and could have implications for HIV-infected adults. Dimitrov cautioned, though, that the study needs to be repeated with a larger number of subjects.

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