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Updated: Jul 7, 2026

An Affordable HIV-1 Drug Resistance Monitoring Method for Resource Limited Settings
Published on: March 30, 2014
Vaccination against drug resistance in HIV infection
Andreas Boberg1, Maria Isaguliants
1Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, 171 82 Solna, Sweden. andreas.boberg@smi.ki.se
Abstract:
HIV-1 resistance to currently employed antiretroviral drugs and drug-associated adverse reactions and toxicity point to a need for additional measures to control HIV-1 replication in HIV-infected patients. The immune system of HIV-infected individuals mount an immune response against the regions harboring drug-resistance mutations, sometimes stronger than that against the parental wild-type sequences. A potent cross-reactive immune response against drug-resistant pol proteins can suppress the replication of drug-escaping HIV. This suggests the possibility for a vaccination against existing and anticipated drug-resistant HIV variants. If successful, therapeutic vaccines against drug resistance would ease the therapeutic modalities and limit the spread of drug-resistant HIV. A better understanding of the complex interactions between patterns of drug-resistance mutations, immune responses against these mutations and their antigen presentation by particular human lymphocyte antigen alleles could help to tailor these vaccines after new drugs/new mutations. In this review, we describe the developments in the field of immunization against mutations conferring drug resistance and evaluate their prospects for human vaccination.
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