At present, approximately 1 million Americans and 33 million people worldwide are infected with HIV. The vast majority of these individuals are destined to die of AIDS unless truly effective therapy can be developed. For them, as well as many more who will become infected within the next few years, any future vaccine will come too late, and effective therapy must be developed to combat existing infection.

The application of therapies using combinations of antiviral drugs has shown that virus growth in infected people can be brought to a halt and, in many individuals, provide considerable and long-lasting improvement in their condition. These therapies have helped large numbers of people live relatively normal lives despite their HIV infection. Most importantly, they prove the concept that antiviral drugs can give long-term relief to patients with HIV infection, but fall far short of providing a long-term solution. The problem facing all the strategies is the development of resistance in the virus due to the appearance of specific mutations. In an effort to avoid resistance, drugs have to be given at high — somewhat toxic — doses, in expensive combinations, and on exacting and difficult-to-follow schedules. Even then, the therapy often fails, and resistant virus appears. There is, therefore, a desperate need to understand how the virus develops resistance to drugs, and to use this understanding to develop more effective strategies for treating HIV infection.

The HIV Drug Resistance Program (DRP) represents a focused basic science research effort that addresses this need and builds on the existing strength of HIV and retrovirus research within the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The NCI has a long-standing tradition of strength in retroviruses, due to their importance to cancer research. This tradition has carried over into AIDS research, and there are currently more than 20 research groups within the NCI and contract laboratories who devote at least part of their effort to the study of HIV. The studies currently underway range from basic research into how the virus interacts with its host cell to vaccine development and drug discovery.

Last modified: 31 July 2008