Dr. Makau is a research scientist at KEMRI and a postdoctoral researcher at the KEMRI Graduate School of Health Sciences. She is a holder of a Career Development Fellowship funded by the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP) for a period of three years from 2020-2023. Her study titled ‘Determination of HIV-1 drug resistance among patients failing second-line treatment in Kenya using an in-house phenotypic assay’ aims at developing and validating a novel assay for isolating infectious human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from clinical samples and testing for drug resistance.
The global efforts to combat the HIV pandemic are being hampered by the increasing prevalence of resistance to HIV drugs. The testing of HIV drug resistance is crucial in determining the best treatment regimen especially for patients with a history of treatment failure. Though there are assays commercially available for HIV drug resistance testing, they mainly rely on amplifying selected genes of the virus and this leaves out minor drug resistant variants as well as other genes of the virus that may also confer resistance. In this project, a new assay will be developed that will enable us to capture and isolate infectious
HIV from clinical samples and test for resistance. This study will give insights into the complexity of HIV drug resistance in Kenya and assist to guide the selection of effective treatment regimens for optimal viral suppression. This project is part of the EDCTP2 programme supported by the European Union (Grant number: TMA2019CDF-2716).
