Virco BVBA moving premises
In a staged execution, Virco has started to move its laboratory and administrative offices from the site in Mechelen, Belgium to the Janssen Pharmaceutica campus in Beerse, Belgium. We will continue to offer our vircoTYPE HIV-1 and HCV research services during the move and have taken the necessary measures to ensure real-time testing of samples during this transition period.

Once we have more details we will be advising our customers, but formal communications on this are being disseminated. We look forward to continuing all our services from our new premises with the same quality and efficiency as we did from Mechelen.

Virco, in collaboration with leading specialists, presented three posters:

• Resistance Associated Mutations to Etravirine (TMC-125) in Antiretroviral Naïve Patients infected with non-B HIV-1 subtypes”; Maïga AI, et al.
• Primary Mutations Associated with Resistance to Raltegravir are not Detectable by Pyrosequencing in Integrase-Inhibitors Naive Patients; Ceccherini-Silberstein F, et al.
• Estimation of Virological Residual Activity on a Regimen of Abacavir/Zidovudine/Lamivudine (ABC/3TC/ZDV); Dunn D, et al.

Other key highlights included research presentations on response prediction, second generation integrase inhibitors, anti-microbicide development and tropism. 
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EHDRW 2010
The European HIV Drug Resistance Workshop was held between March 17th and 19th in Sorrento, Italy.

Virco was very pleased to be able to present three oral presentations:

• Rare HIV-1 drug resistance mutations exert subtle synergistic and antagonistic effects in the context of the genetic background; Van Houtte M, et al.
• Genetic diversity and multi-drug class resistance of a large HIV-1 sequence repository; Van Der Borght K, et al.
• Efficiency of HIV-1 PR-RT genotyping on clinical isolates with viral load less than 1000 copies/mL: A 12 year analysis; Pattery T, et al.

Of particular interest we noted some very interesting new research on managing integrase inhibitor resistance and on response prediction.

• Dominated by the US stimulus package healthcare reforms and the considerable expansion in the electronic medical record market.

World of Health IT (WoHIT), Barcelona, Spain March 15th – 18th
An international audience with a focus on the operational aspects of health information systems that are already being implemented:

• A very different agenda, with some key themes for EU electronic medical record adoption.

We will provide more updates on our HIT activity and the development of the LABTRACKER™ platform as appropriate throughout the year..

Hepatology, and in particular the management of viral hepatitis is seeing a considerable paradigm shift in terms of both therapeutics and diagnostics:

• From a therapeutic perspective the impending late-stage results from direct acting antivirals (DAAs) and the significant development pipeline across the industry reinforce the potential paradigm shift for the treatment of chronic hepatitis C.
• Diagnostics are playing an ever-increasing role, especially following the discovery of human biomarkers for predicting chronicity of disease and potential response to therapy with pegylated interferon and ribavirin.