HIVdb accepts user-submitted protease and RT sequences and returns inferred levels of resistance to 19 commonly used protease and RT inhibitors. Its purpose is educational and as such it provides extensive comments and a highly transparent scoring system that is hyperlinked to data in the HIV Drug Resistance Database. In clinical settings, genotypic data must be used in conjunction with a patient's clinical history (including past treatments) and a solid understanding of the principles of antiretroviral treatment (http://www.aidsinfo.nih.gov/guidelines/).

The drug resistance interpretation system used here is similar to the one used by the Stanford University Hospital (SUH) Diagnostic Virology Lab. However, each of the SUH Diagnostic Virology Lab reports is manually reviewed before being reported to the ordering physician.

A detailed description of the program as well as all updates can be found in the Release Notes.

Web Service
A web service (known as Sierra) has been created to allow users to take advantage of HIVdb programmatically. If you handle large numbers of sequences, or if you want to integrate HIVdb into your IT infrastructure, be sure to check out this new offering.