Predictors of virologic response to ritonavir-boosted protease inhibitors

The primary mechanism of resistance to protease inhibitors involves the stepwise accumulation of mutations that alter and block the substrate binding site of HIV protease. The large degree of cross-resistance among the different protease inhibitors is a source of considerable concern for the management of patients after treatment failure. Although the output of HIV-resistance tests has been based on therapeutically arbitrary criteria, there is now an ongoing move towards correlating test interpretation with virologic outcomes on treatment. This approach is undeniably superior, in principle, for tests intended to guide drug choices. However, the predictive accuracy of a given stratagem that links genotype or phenotype to drug response is strongly influenced by the study design, data capture and the analytical methodology used to derive it. There is no definitively superior methodology for generating a genotype-response association for use in interpreting a resistance test, and the various approaches used to date all have their strengths and weaknesses. Combining the information of therapeutic drug monitoring and resistance tests is likely to be of greatest clinical utility in antiretroviral-experienced patients harboring HIV strains with reduced susceptibility. The combination of pharmacologic and virologic parameters as a predictor of the virologic response has been merged into the parameter known as "inhibitory quotient". This article discusses the potential interest of the use of inhibitory quotients as an approach for enhancing the potency and durability of boosted protease inhibitors against protease inhibitor-resistant viruses.