Patent ID: 7989161

Claim:
A method for determining if an HIV-2 retrovirus is sensitive, or resistant, to an HIV-2 viral protease inhibitor comprising: a) extracting nucleic acids from cells taken from a human infected by a HIV-2 retrovirus; b) amplifying from the extracted nucleic acids a nucleic acid sequence comprising the sequence encoding the amino acid sequence of HIV-2 protease; c) combining the amplified sequence and an expression vector allowing the expression of the sequence coding of the HIV-2 protease under the control of an inducible promoter by transforming a yeast cell with said sequence and expression vector; d) culturing the transformed yeast cell under conditions that do not result in HIV-2 protease expression to obtain a population; e) inducing the expression of the HIV-2 protease by inducing the promoter of the expression vector; f) incubating the population with the HIV-2 viral protease inhibitor; g) monitoring growth of the population; h) determining if the population grew or stopped growing; whereby the HIV-2 retrovirus is determined to be sensitive to the HIV-2 viral protease inhibitor if the population grew after incubation with said HIV-2 viral protease inhibitor, or the HIV-2 isolate is determined to be resistant to the HIV-2 viral protease inhibitor if the population stopped growing after incubation with said HIV-2 viral protease inhibitor.