Results of Raltegravir plus combination antiretroviral therapy in early HIV infection

Addition of the integrase strand transfer inhibitor raltegravir (RAL) to standard antiretroviral therapy (ART) in ART-naive patients with early HIV infection was not associated with a difference in the quantity of HIV DNA, residual virus in the blood, or CD4+ T-cells containing replication-competent virus, according to a new study published in BioResearch Open Access.

Ann Collier and a team of researchers from University of Washington and Harborview Medical Center, Seattle, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, MD, compared the effects of standard triple ART regimen to standard combination ART plus RAL over 96 weeks. They describe the study design and report their results in the article "A Pilot Study of Raltegravir Plus Combination Antiretroviral Therapy in Early Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection: Challenges and Lessons Learned".

"The lessons learned from this pilot study will be informative to other researchers in this field, particularly in the design of future studies looking at the effects of ART in early HIV infection," says BioResearch Open Access Editor Jane Taylor, PhD, MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institutes of Health Award Number AI57005. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.