EuResist

EuResist is an international project designed to improve the treatment of HIV patients by developing a computerized system that can recommend optimal treatment based on the patient’s clinical and genomic data.

The project is part of the Virtual Physiological Human framework, funded by the European Commission. It started in 2006 with the formation of a consortium of several research institutes and hospitals in Europe and Israel. The consortium completed its commitment to the European Commission near the end of 2008, at which time the system became available online. A non-profit organization was consequently established by the main partners to maintain and improve the system.

In 2009, the EuResist project was named as a Computerworld honors program laureate.

AIDS is a disease caused by the HIV retrovirus, which progressively reduces the effectiveness of the immune system, leading to infections and ultimately death.

More than 30 different drugs exist for treating HIV patients. Antiretroviral drugs can disrupt the virus’s replication process causing its numbers to decrease dramatically. While the virus cannot be eradicated completely, in small numbers it is harmless. Usually a patient is given a combination of three or four drugs, a treatment known as highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART. The main reason such a treatment might fail is the development of mutated strands of the virus, resistant to one or more of the prescribed drugs.

Thus an important consideration when choosing treatment for a patient is to prescribe those drugs to which the particular patient’s virus strands are most susceptible. One way to achieve that is to extract virus samples from the patient’s blood and test them against all possible drugs. Since this process is lengthy and costly, computerized systems have been developed to predict virus resistance based on its genotype. The treating physician samples virus genotype sequences from the patient’s blood and provides this data to a computerized system. The system then responds with drug recommendations.

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Wikipedia