Patent ID: 6221578
Filing Date: 2001-04-24
Classification: C12N,G01N,Y02A

Abstract:
A method of managing HIV chemotherapy of patients who are HIV positive, which comprisestransfecting a cell line susceptible to infection by HIV with a sequence from the pol gene of HIV, which sequence encodes a desired target enzyme, obtained by isolating viral RNA from a sample of a biological material from a patient and reverse transcribing the desired region of said pol gene, and a HIV-DNA construct that lacks a sequence encoding said desired target enzyme,culturing said transfected cells so as to create a stock of chimeric viruses,assessing the phenotypic sensitivity of said chimeric viruses to an inhibitor of said enzyme encoded by the pol gene of HIV and assigning a value thereto,constructing a data set comprising said value for chimeric virus sensitivity and the corresponding value for a chimeric wild-type strain of HIV,repeating the sensitivity assessment for at least two further inhibitors and thereby constructing at least three such data sets in total,representing said data sets in two dimensional or three dimensional graphical form such that the difference between the chimeric and wild-type sensitivities in the case of each data set provides a visual measure of the resistance of the chimeric stock to treatment by the inhibitor in question, andselecting the optimum inhibitor(s) on the basis of the graphical representation of the resistance so measured.