3-DCR NYC A Novel Lethal HIV Recombinant?
Recombinomics Commentary
March 18, 2005
>> The study, appearing in The Lancet, a medical journal, shows the virus to be resistant to nearly all licensed drugs and particularly aggressive. Most of the study's details were disclosed earlier during an AIDS conference in Boston. The report is based on the work of a team of researchers from the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in Manhattan led by Dr. David D. Ho and Dr. Martin Markowitz. <<
The data in today's Lancet really just makes public the data discussed by ViroLogic over a month ago. There is more detail in the Lancet paper and some sequence data represented in a phylogenetic tree, but the paper in Lancet simply restates last month's information.
3-DCR NYC is unique. It has a wild type replication capacity, yet is resistant to the three major classes of anti-HIV drugs. These properties were determined in in vitro assays and are not host dependent.
Issues relating to host factors affecting progression, as well as transmissibility of the virus, remain open. However, the combination of the dual receptor usage, normal replication capacity, and drug resistance in one virus, is new, and raises the possibility that this is a novel and deadly recombinant formed via dual infection.
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