The engine is not intended to replace the HIV specialist but rather to be an advisory tool. Updates and upgrades are required to exploit the full potential of this and other data-driven expert systems. Treatment response data from patients treated with the novel drugs are critically needed to enable new regimens to be included in the engine set. Integrating new drugs into

the system has required more than 1 year because of the need to collect a sufficient amount of training data and retrain and validate the selleck screening library system. Clearly, early access to drug resistance data derived from Phase III clinical trials, once the drugs have been licensed, is a critical step for reducing this delay. Also, the TCE collection must include instances from patients infected with all the different HIV-1 clades to weight a possible selleck inhibitor impact of HIV-1 natural variability on treatment. An expanded, publicly available TCE repository could be the best way of providing a common source for training and testing treatment decision support tools. It is hoped that the scientific community

and regulatory bodies will endorse such an initiative to further improve clinical management of HIV-1 drug resistance. This work was presented at the Eighth European HIV Drug Resistance Workshop, Sorrento, Italy, 17–19 March 2009. The EuResist Project was funded by the European Community under FP6 (IST-2004-027173). The EuResist Network has been supported by grants from Abbott and Pfizer and is

part of the European Community’s Seventh SPTBN5 Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under the project ‘Collaborative HIV and Anti-HIV Drug Resistance Network (CHAIN)’ (grant agreement number 223131). “
“Sleep disorders are common in patients with HIV/AIDS, and can lead to poor quality of life. Although many studies have investigated the aetiology of these disorders, it is still unclear whether impaired sleep quality is associated with HIV itself, social problems, or side effects of antiretroviral therapy (ART). Moreover, despite its known neurological associations, little is known about the role of the trans-activator of transcription (Tat) protein in sleep disorders in patients with HIV/AIDS. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that the sleep quality of patients with HIV/AIDS affected by an altered circadian rhythm correlates with cerebrospinal HIV Tat protein concentration. Ninety-six patients with HIV/AIDS between 20 and 69 years old completed the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Their circadian rhythm parameters of blood pressure, Tat concentration in cerebrospinal fluid, melatonin concentration, CD4 cell count and HIV RNA viral load in serum were measured. The circadian amplitude of systolic blood pressure and the score for sleep quality (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index) were negatively correlated with HIV Tat protein concentration, while the melatonin value was positively correlated with Tat protein concentration.