Antivirogram®

Antivirogram® is a conventional HIV-1 phenotyping assay that uses fully replication-competent (see below) recombinant virus to asses the susceptibility to each of the currently available Protease and Reverse Transcriptase inhibitors.

Introduced in the market in 1998, Antivirogram® was the first commercially available HIV-1 phenotype test. It has been instrumental to the development of many antiretroviral drugs and helped physicians and researchers better understand the phenomenon of HIV-1 drug resistance.

Contrary to some other phenotype tests, Antivirogram® uses infectious recombinant virus particles that undergo several rounds of replication in a CD4+ T-cell line. Thus, the assay reflects under laboratory conditions the complete viral life cycle that takes place in infected patients.

The infectious nature of the recombinant virus used in this assay requires the assay to be performed in specially equipped BioSafety Level 3 (BSL-3) laboratories. Our BSL3 lab in Mechelen, Belgium, is the biggest of its kind in Europe.