WAART with joint forces

Highly active antiretroviral therapy is a method of treating HIV-infected people with several drugs (usually 3-4), the purpose of which is to suppress the virus at different stages of its development. Today, this technique allows not only to suppress the type of disease that an infected person has, but also its natural mutations, at the same time increasing the duration and raising the quality of life. These are not empty words, because Modern medicine has come to this for almost 50 years, and the current results are due to researchers working in the field of viral diseases.

Thanks to them, EuResist emerged - a non-profit organization that emerged as a result of the merger of several laboratories: the Karolinska Institute ( Stockholm ), the Institute for Informatics of the Max Planck Society ( Saarbrücken ), the University of Siena and the University of Cologne .

Two goals are pursued by its founders:
- To conduct joint research and scientific projects between all participants;
- Control the distribution and use of the results obtained in the course of projects among all participants.
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With the help of a grant from the European Commission and solutions built using IBM technologies, EuResist was able to create an application that helps the doctor predict the patient's response to certain drugs that he writes out with an accuracy of 78%. The organization’s database contains about 50,000 case histories of HIV-infected people (their data was obtained thanks to the organization’s partners — various medical institutions and institutions: demographic data, virus data, treatment history, etc.), through which the medical staff sees such an accurate picture of what is happening. and is able to adequately respond to the constantly changing state of the patient. Despite the individual development of the virus in each person, all cases can be combined according to similar signs and symptoms - and prescribe the appropriate treatment.

Today it is the largest database of viral genotypes and adequate clinical actions in response to the appearance of each of them. The video at the end of the post describes what has been achieved in Ethiopia, but only because developed countries have already gone through terrible experience in treating such diseases. And since we know that an absolute cure for HIV does not yet exist, EuResist will have to constantly improve its research methods.

The task of the IBM Research team in building the GEIE network, through which employees of various hospitals access this application, was to provide a flexible platform for processing a large amount of metadata - in this form are IBM DB2 Universal DataBase and IBM WebSphere Application Server used for searching and analyzing different data.

The result of this work turned out to be very good - according to a recent study, in 9 out of 10 cases, the results of computer selection of drug combinations are better than those proposed by experts.

More about EuResist
Project page from IBM.