Predicting Response to HIV Therapy

Abstract

speaks to Francesca Lake, Managing Commissioning Editor: Dr Larder is one of the world's leading experts in the fields of HIV drug resistance and pharmacogenomics. Dr Larder is a graduate of Cambridge University (UK) and started his professional career studying herpes viruses at the University, gaining his PhD in Virology. Moving to Wellcome (London, UK) in 1985, Dr Larder went on to discover HIV drug resistance. His seminal work on azidothymidine resistance and its genetic basis was achieved while working for the Wellcome Research Laboratories and published in 1989. Since then, Dr Larder has continued to pioneer understanding in the field, unraveling the genetic basis of resistance to several other HIV drugs and developing many of the laboratory techniques for studying HIV drug resistance, including phenotyping and genotyping methodologies. Dr Larder left Glaxo Wellcome in 1997 to set up the UK subsidiary of Belgian diagnostics group Virco (Mechelen, Belgium). During the next 4 years Dr Larder helped Virco to become a leader in HIV drug resistance testing and developed a revolutionary new approach to the interpretation HIV genotypes – the Virtual Phenotype. This provided interpretation of individual patient genotypes, by matching them with genotypes in a large relational database and retrieving and averaging the phenotypes from those matched viruses. Dr Larder was appointed Chief Scientific Officer of Visible Genetics following their acquisition of Virco's Cambridge research group in September 2001. After leaving Visible Genetics in late 2002, Dr Larder instigated the formation of the HIV Resistance Response Database Initiative, or RDI. The RDI has established the largest database in the world of patient data relating to antiretroviral treatment outcomes and has developed online models that predict how individual patients will respond to different drug combinations.