New Diagnostic System for HIV

A phase I, double-blind controlled trial of a new diagnostic system for HIV involves 40 HIV-positive patients.

In the trial, each patient will receive a standard phenotype test, an increasingly common tool that can help doctors determine which drugs are no longer effective against the predominant strain in an HIV-infected patient. The same 40 subjects will also receive another antiviral efficacy test generated by the HIV SpectraPoint assay of SpectraDigital Corp. (SDC, Guelp, Canada). Doctors should have the results of this rapid test within 24 hours. This, in turn, allows essential treatment decisions to be made before the virus can develop new, unseen resistance patterns.

The hope is that patients will receive real clinical benefit from rapidly available data supplanting the traditional time window of weeks, and that HIV doctors will at the same time have a more accurate "snapshot” of their patient's disease.

"This pilot study represents an important step in the development of our HIV diagnostics solutions,” said Satish Deshpande, president of SpectraDigital. "In addition to our primary objective of comparing HIV SpectraPoint to a standard phenotypic resistance assay, we also will determine the ability of our system to detect resistance among individuals with viral loads well below the limit of detection of traditional assays.”

SDC develops cell-based technologies to resolve various problems in drug development, environmental monitoring, and medical diagnostics.




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