News

Featured news from NHIVNA

HIV-related news from NAM

Unique case of PrEP failure without drug resistance reported from Amsterdam
Gus Cairns, 2017-02-17 00:10:00

HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) appears to be nearly 100% effective if taken consistently so that there are high drug levels in the body at the time of exposure to HIV.

However, among tens of thousands of cases of PrEP preventing HIV, there have been a few reports of people who acquired HIV despite high adherence to PrEP and adequate drug levels. The most fully documented case was reported a year ago at CROI 2016 in Boston. In this case, the most likely explanation of why PrEP had not worked was that the person concerned had met someone with a strain of HIV with an unusual pattern of drug resistance that overcame PrEP.

Yesterday, however, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2017) heard about a case where someone in a PrEP demonstration study caught a strain of HIV with no drug resistance, despite documented high drug levels.

Source:1