Arevir: A Secure Platform for Designing Personalized Antiretroviral Therapies Against HIV

Despite the availability of antiretroviral combination therapies, success in drug treatment of HIV-infected patients is limited. One reason for therapy failure is the development of drug-resistant genetic variants. In principle, the viral genomic sequence provides resistance information and could thus guide the selection of an optimal drug combination. In practice however, the benefit of this procedure is impaired by (1) the difficulty in inferring the clinically relevant information from the genotype of the virus and (2) the restricted availability of this information. We have developed a secure platform for collaborative research aimed at optimizing anti-HIV therapies, called Arevir. A relational database schema was designed and implemented together with a web-based user interface. Our system provides a basis for monitoring patients, decision-support, and computational analyses. Thus, it merges clinical, diagnostic and bioinformatics efforts to exploit genomic and patient therapy data in clinical practice.