Distinguished Speaker Series: Distinguished Speaker Series: How did we stop HIV evolution?
Dr. Pleuni Pennings, Department of Biology, San Francisco State University
Abstract: Drug resistance evolution was a huge problem for HIV treatment from the late 80s all the way until a few years ago. It is often suggested that drug resistance evolution cannot happen when at least three drugs are used at the same time. I will use historical data to show that it is more complicated. The initial three-drug therapies for HIV still allowed for a lot of drug resistance evolution to happen. I will propose a hypothesis that can explain why these early triple-drug therapies still allowed drug resistance evolution to happen and why newer triple-drug therapies work much better – we believe that it is related to spatial structure of drug and virus in the human body.
Host: Dr. Adi Stern, Life Sciences Faculty, TAU.