Monitoring of HIV Drug Resistance Mutations in Newly Diagnosed Patients in Cyprus (2010–2012)

BACKGROUND: A molecular epidemiology study of HIV-1 infection was conducted in 100 HIV-1 diagnosed and untreated patients in Cyprus representing 65.4 percent of all the reported HIV-1 infections in Cyprus between 2010 and 2012. METHODS: Eighty-two patients were newly diagnosed (genotypic drug resistance testing within six months from diagnosis), and 18 patients were HIV-1 diagnosed for a longer period or the diagnosis date was unknown. RESULTS: Phylogenetic trees of the pol sequences obtained in this study with reference sequences indicated that subtypes B and A1 were the most common subtypes present and accounted for 41.0 and 19.0% respectively, followed by subtype C (7.0%), F1 (8.0%), CRF02_AG (4.0%), A2 (2.0%), other CRFs (7.0%) and unknown recombinant forms, URFs (12%). Most of newly-diagnosed study subjects were Cypriots (63%), males (78%) with median age 39 (Interquartile Range, IQR 33–48) reporting having sex with other men, MSM (51%). CONCLUSION: A high rate of clustered transmission of subtype B drug-sensitive strains to reverse transcriptase and protease inhibitors was observed among MSM. Twenty-eight out of forty-one MSM study subjects (68.0%) infected were implicated in five transmission clusters, two of which are subtype A1 and three subtype B strains. The two largest MSM subtype B clusters included nine and eight Cypriot men, respectively, living in all major cities in Cyprus. There were only three newly diagnosed patients with transmitted drug resistant HIV-1 strains, one study subject from the United Kingdom infected with subtype B strain and one from Romania with subtype A2 strain, both with the PI drug resistance mutation M46L and one patient from Greece with subtype A1 strain with the NNRTI drug resistance mutation K103N. DISCLOSURES: All authors: No reported disclosures.