Rationale and Uses of a Public HIV Drug-Resistance Database

Knowledge regarding the drug resistance of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is critical for surveillance of drug resistance, development of antiretroviral drugs, and management of infections with drug-resistant viruses. Such knowledge is derived from studies that correlate genetic variation in the targets of therapy with the antiretroviral treatments received by persons from whom the variant was obtained (genotype-treatment), with drug-susceptibility data on genetic variants (genotype-phenotype), and with virological and clinical re-sponse to a new treatment regimen (genotype-outcome). An HIV drug-resistance database is required to represent, store, and analyze the diverse forms of data underlying our knowledge of drug resistance and to make these data available to the broad community of researchers studying drug resistance in HIV and clinicians using HIV drug-resistance tests. Such genotype-treatment, genotype-phenotype, and genotype-outcome cor-relations are contained in the Stanford HIV RT and Protease Sequence Database and have specific usefulness. Publicly available databases have revolutionized how biological research is done and have led to an expo-nential increase in discovery brought on through sec-ondary analyses of publicly available data. As medical research is increasingly turning to studies of sequenc