Congratulations on these high impact papers recently published.
Paper 1 – ‘Association of the HLA-B*53:01 Allele With Drug Reaction With Eosinophilia and Systemic Symptoms (DRESS) Syndrome During Treatment of HIV Infection With Raltegravir’.
Published by Mark Thomas, Chris Hopkins, Eamon Duffy, Daniel Lee, Pierre Loulergue, Diego Ripamonti, David A. Ostrov, and Elizabeth Phillips.
Mark Thomas led an international collaboration, which showed that raltegravir, a drug commonly used to treat HIV infection, can bind within the peptide binding groove of the HLA-B*53:01 molecule. This is the presumed mechanism that led patients to develop DRESS syndrome, a severe delayed hypersensitivity drug reaction with increased numbers of eosinophils present in the blood, and potentially fatal impairment of various organs such as the skin, lungs, kidneys and liver. Read the paper
Paper 2 – ‘Treatment of gonorrhoea in Auckland, New Zealand: marked variation in prescriber adherence to treatment guidelines’.
Published by Rose Forster, Diana Ng, Arlo Upton, Rick Franklin and Mark Thomas.
Research by local doctors and a summer student, showed that a high proportion of patients who had gonorrhoea diagnosed in Auckland during 2015 were not treated with a recommended antibiotic regimen. This failure to follow treatment guidelines increases the risk of spread of antibiotic resistant strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae.
Read the paper here