HIV multidrug class resistance prediction with a time sliding anchor approach

The emergence of multidrug class resistance (MDR) in Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a rare but significant challenge in antiretroviral therapy (ART). MDR, which may arise from prolonged drug exposure, treatment failures, or transmission of resistant strains, accelerates disease progression and poses particular challenges in resource-limited settings with restricted access to resistance testing and advanced therapies. Early prediction of future MDR development is important to inform therapeutic decisions and mitigate its occurrence.

In this study, we employ various machine learning classifiers to predict future resistance to all four major antiretroviral drug classes using features extracted from clinical HIV sequence data. We systematically explore several variations of the problem that differ in the pre-existing resistance level and the temporal gap between sample collection and observed MDR occurrence. Our models show the ability to predict multidrug class resistance even in the most challenging variations, albeit at a reduced accuracy. Feature importance analysis reveals that our models primarily utilize known drug resistance mutations for easier classification tasks, but rely on new mutations for the difficult task of distinguishing four class drug resistance from three class drug resistance.

All analysis was performed using the Euresist Integrated DataBase (EIDB). Researchers wishing to reproduce, validate or extend these findings can request access to the latest EIDB release via the Euresist Network.