Dr. Janies leads team to build interactive map of drug resistant lineages of avian influenza
Wednesday 01/07/2009
Daniel Janies of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at The Ohio State University, lead a team of colleagues from Colorado and Kansas to build an interactive map of the spread of lineages of avian influenza that are resistant to drugs.
The study entitled "Evolution of drug
resistance in multiple distinct lineages of H5N1 avian influenza" is published in the journal "Infection, Genetics and Evolution"
The map, which can be downloaded at the
Supramap OSU site is viewable with Google Earth and similar tools that read keyhole markup language.
The team used data from 677 avian influenza genomes to trace the evolutionary history of the pathogen over time, space, and various hosts. In addition, the team studied the evolutionary pressure to select for strains of the virus carrying specific mutations that confer resistance to drugs based on adamantanes and the drug oseltamivir (trade name Tamiflu ®).
The widespread use of drugs based on adamantanes in Asia and Russia has created a situation where these drugs are no longer useful worldwide against seasonal influenza and locally against avian influenza (H5N1).
The evolutionary response of influenza to widespread use of adamantanes provides a cautionary tale in the case of oseltamivir. Oseltamivir has been stockpiled worldwide as a keystone of pandemic preparedness. Recently strains of seasonal influenza (H1N1) collected throughout the world have show high rates of resistance to oseltamivir. H5N1 has thus far shown only pockets of resistance to oseltamivir in Egypt, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Russia. Although these cases seem isolated, the evolution of multiple independent lineages of influenza that are resistant to drugs indicates that the virus can readily evade prophylactic drugs. Thus comprehensive pandemic preparedness plans with judicious use of prophylactic drugs are warranted.