EuResist
Computerized system for HIV treatment recommendations.
EuResist is an international project that developed a computerized clinical decision support system for HIV treatment. It recommends optimal antiretroviral therapy by analyzing a patient's clinical and genomic data. The system became available online in late 2008 and was the first of its kind to be freely accessible for customized therapy.
Quick Facts
- Operating system
- Cross-platform
- Released
- 2006
Facts from the source article.
Background
AIDS results from the HIV retrovirus, which weakens the immune system and can lead to fatal infections. Over 30 antiretroviral drugs exist; they disrupt viral replication, reducing the virus to harmless levels, though eradication is impossible. Standard treatment is highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), combining three or four drugs. Treatment failure often occurs due to drug-resistant viral mutations. Selecting drugs to which a patient's virus is susceptible is crucial. Direct laboratory testing of virus samples against all drugs is lengthy and costly, so computerized systems predict resistance from viral genotype sequences. Before EuResist, such systems had limited accuracy because they used relatively small datasets, relied on in vitro data (which does not fully replicate living organisms and poorly predicts combination resistance), and employed simple mathematical models.
Purpose
EuResist aimed to create a clinical decision support system for selecting effective antiretroviral therapy using clinical and virological data. It built a large database of in vivo records—clinical and genomic data from real HIV treatments across European clinics—including patient demographics, viral sequences, prescribed drugs, and resulting viral load changes. An array of machine learning models (Bayesian networks, logistic regression, and others) was trained on this data. Physicians access the system via a web interface, inputting patient data; the system returns treatment suggestions with predicted effects on viral load. In a 2011 study by the British HIV Association involving 15 treatment successes and 10 failures, EuResist performed comparably to or better than human experts.
History
EuResist began in 2006 as a European Union-funded consortium under the Virtual Physiological Human FP-6 framework. Partners included IBM Haifa Research Laboratory, Informa S.r.l., Karolinska Institutet, Kingston University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, MTA Wigner Fizikai Kutatóközpont Részecske- és Magfizikai Intézet, University of Siena, and Universitätsklinikum Köln. The consortium fulfilled its commitment in late 2008, making the system available online. The first five partners formed a non-profit organization to maintain and update the system and database. By mid-2010, the system received about 600 queries per quarter.
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