HIV Testing Blog

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last week ruled in favor of Roche in a longstanding patent-infringement dispute with Stanford University regarding ownership of PCR-based test kits for measuring HIV viral load.

Stanford did not have standing to file suit because, the court determined, Roche owned the patents at issue.

A lower court, the US District Court for the Northern District of California, was instructed to dismiss the suit. The district court had ruled in 2008 that the patents were invalid, but did not agree with Roche’s claims of ownership. According to the appeals court, the district should not have addressed the patents’ validity because Stanford didn’t own the IP to begin with.

This was considered, by many, to be a complete victory for Roche.

Stanford first sued Roche in 2005, seeking more than $200 million for the alleged infringement of three patents assigned to Stanford — US Nos. 5,968,730; 6,503,705; and 7,129,041. The three patents descend from a common parent application and share the same title: “Polymerase Chain Reaction Assays for Monitoring Antiviral Therapy and Making Therapeutic Decisions in the Treatment of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.”

The test was developed, and is currently used, to measure the viral load of HIV in a person’s blood, by measuring the amount of HIV RNA present in the bloodstream. The original description of the use of the PCR to measure HIV RNA was published in the Journal of Infectious Disease in 1991.

For the complete article, please refer to www.hivtestingblog.com/original-articles/

HIV post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) is commonly used among health care workers and other individuals who believe they have recently been exposed to HIV. PEP can actually prevent HIV infection in some individuals, but according to a report in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, even when PEP fails to prevent the infection it may still have beneficial effects.

The report involved a 38-year old gay man who reported having unprotected anal sex with multiple partners in the previous 48 hours. The patient was treated with Truvada as post-exposure prophylaxis. During his treatment the patient reported more episodes of risky sex, causing his treatment to be extended. During his treatment the patient was repeatedly tested for HIV. He received a couple negative HIV results, but after repeated exposures the patient tested HIV-positive.

The patient received three viral load tests shortly after his positive HIV test result. The viral load turned out to be extremely low, and his CD4 count was high. These results were out of the ordinary for someone with an acute HIV infection, and the patient had no HIV seroconversion symptoms. Several more tests were performed on the patient and all of them returned similar findings.

The authors of the article report that the patient’s HIV infection was weaker than usual, and that this result was most likely due to the antiretroviral therapy he was receiving.

*For the complete article please refer to http://hivtestingblog.com/original-articles/