Resistance can be useful
The most common type of drug-resistant HIV encountered in people taking treatment is resistant to 3TC. But the ‘M184V’ mutation has been found to impair HIV’s ability to reproduce. A team led by Dr Mark Wainberg found that HIV with the M184V mutation stayed stuck in its impaired state and was unable to change any further. They created artificially ‘attenuated’ (defective) viruses and found that under test-tube conditions only those lacking the M184V mutation were able to re-establish their full replicative capacity.

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