The
strain is a part of the Group M version of HIV-1, the same family of
virus subtypes to blame for the global HIV pandemic, according to Abbott
Laboratories, which conducted the research along with the University of
Missouri, Kansas City.
The findings were published Wednesday,
November 7th in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. HIV
has several different subtypes or strains, and like other viruses, it
has the ability to change and mutate over time.
This is the
first new Group M HIV strain identified since guidelines for classifying
subtypes were established in 2000. It is important to know what strains
of the virus are circulating to ensure that tests used to detect the
disease are effective.
“It can be a real challenge for diagnostic
tests,” Mary Rodgers, a co-author of the report and a principal
scientist at Abbott, said. Her company tests more than 60% of the
world’s blood supply, she said, and they have to look for new strains
and track those in circulation so “we can accurately detect it, no
matter where it happens to be in the world.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
said current treatments for HIV are effective against this strain and
others. However, identifying a new strain provides a more complete map
of how HIV evolves.
“There’s no reason to panic or even to worry
about it a little bit,” Fauci said. “Not a lot of people are infected
with this. This is an outlier.” For scientists to be able to declare
that this was a new subtype, three cases of it must be detected
independently. The first two were found in the Democratic Republic of
Congo in the 1983 and 1990. The two strains were “very unusual and
didn’t match other strains,” Rodgers said.
The third sample found
in Congo was collected in 2001 as a part of a study aimed at preventing
mother-to-child transmission of the virus. The sample was small, and
while it seemed similar to the two older samples, scientists wanted to
test the whole genome to be sure. At the time, there wasn’t technology
to determine if this was the new subtype. So scientists at Abbott and
the University of Missouri developed new techniques to study and map the
2001 sample. Rodgers said it was “like searching for a needle in a
haystack,” and then “pulling the needle out with a magnet.”
“This
discovery reminds us that to end the HIV pandemic, we must continue to
out think this continuously changing virus and use the latest
advancements in technology and resources to monitor its evolution,”
study co-author, Dr. Carole McArthur, a professor in the department of
oral and craniofacial sciences at the University of Missouri, Kansas
City, said in a statement.
About 36.7 million in the world are
living with HIV, according to World Health Organization. UNAIDS
estimates that in 2016, some 1.8 million people became newly infected.