Genetic variation of the HIV-1 integrase region in newly diagnosed anti-retroviral drug-naïve patients with HIV/AIDS in Korea

The survival time of HIV/AIDS patients in Korea has increased since HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) was introduced. However, the occurrence of drug-resistant strains requires new anti-retroviral drugs, one of which, an integrase inhibitor (INI), was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2007. INIs have been used for therapy in many countries and are about to be employed in Korea. Therefore, it is important to identify basic mutant variants prior to the introduction of INIs in order to estimate their efficacy. To monitor potential drug-resistant INI mutations in Korean HIV/AIDS patients, the polymorphism of the int gene was investigated together with the pol gene using a genotypic assay for 75 randomly selected Korean HIV-1 patients newly diagnosed in 2007. The drug-resistant mutation sequences were analysed using the Stanford HIV DB and the International AIDS Society resistance testing-USA panel (IAS-USA). Seventy strains of Korean subtype B were compared with foreign subtype-B strains, and there were no significantly different variants of the int gene region in the study population. Major mutation sites in the integrase (E92Q, F121Y, G140A/S, Y143C/R, Q148H/R/K and N155H) were not detected, and only a few minor mutation sites (L74M, V151I, E157Q, V165I, I203M, S230N and D232N) were identified in 21 strains (28%). Resistance due to mutations in the pol gene was observed in a single strain (1.3%) resistant to protease inhibitors (PIs) and in four strains (5.3%) resistant to reverse transcriptase inhibitors (RTIs). In summary, this demonstrates that INIs will be susceptible to drug naïve HIV/AIDS patients in Korea.