IMAGE: Associate Professor Gilda Tachedjian

More stringent monitoring and the development of new drugs are urgently needed to combat strains of HIV that are developing resistance to Tenofovir, one of the key drugs used to treat the virus.

Burnet Institute’s Associate Professor Gilda Tachedjian told ABC Radio’s The World Today program the emergence of Tenofovir-resistant strains of HIV is a major concern.

“We don’t want to be in a situation like we have now with antibiotics where we’re down to our last line of antibiotics and close to the pre-antibiotic resistance era,” Associate Professor Tachedjian said.

“So what we want to do is think about developing new drugs that can enter the pipeline for both HIV treatment and prevention.

“At Burnet we’ve actually initiated a drug discovery program using a relatively new paradigm in drug discovery and actually targeting the very enzyme, the very viral protein that Tenofovir targets.

“But we’re doing it in a novel way and looking for novel sites on that particular target so we can come up with drugs that have a different resistance profile to Tenofovir so the drug would be active against Tenofovir resistant virus.”

To read the full transcript of the ABC The World Today report, click here.

And you can find out more about the Tachedjian Laboratory for Retroviral Biology and Antivirals.