Andrea Clemencia Pineda-Peña

Sanofi | SHANTHA · Global Clinical Development Vaccines

The World Health Organization protocol for rabies post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) recommends extensive wound washing, immediate vaccination, and administration of rabies immunoglobulin (RIG) in severe category III exposures. Some studies have shown that RIG can interfere with rabies vaccine immunogenicity to some extent. We investigated the interfe...

Background Hepatitis B is a potentially life-threatening liver infection caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV). HBV-D1 is the dominant subgenotype in the Mediterranean basin, Eastern Europe and Asia. However, little is currently known about its evolutionary history and spatio-temporal dynamics. Methods We use Bayesian phylodynamic inference to inv...

Objective: To investigate the dynamics of phylogenetic transmission clusters involving immigrants of Portuguese Speaking Countries living in Portugal. Design/methods: We included genomic sequences, socio-demographic and clinical data from 772 HIV migrants followed in Portugal between 2001 and 2017. To reconstruct HIV-1 Transmission Clusters (TCs...

Historically, human migrations have determined the spread of many infectious diseases by promoting the emergence of temporal outbreaks between populations. We aimed to analyze health indicators, expenditure, and disability caused by tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/AIDS burden under the Colombian-Venezuelan migration flow focusing on the Northeastern bord...

Introduction: Treatment for All recommendations have allowed access to antiretroviral (ARV) treatment for an increasing number of patients. This minimizes the transmission of infection but can potentiate the risk of transmitted (TDR) and acquired drug resistance (ADR). Objective: To study the trends of TDR and ADR in patients followed up in Port...

Background Treatment for all recommendations has allowed access to antiretroviral (ARV) treatment to an increasing number of patients. This minimizes transmission of infection but can potentiate the risk for development of transmitted drug resistance (TDR) and acquired drug resistance (ADR). Objective To study the trends of TDR and ADR in patients...

Migration is associated with HIV-1 vulnerability. Objectives: To identify long-term trends in HIV-1 molecular epidemiology and antiretroviral drug resistance (ARV) among migrants followed up in Portugal Methods: 5177 patients were included between 2001 and 2017. Rega, Scuel, Comet, and jPHMM algorithms were used for subtyping. Transmitted drug re...

Since the ignition of the HIV-1 group M pandemic in the beginning of the 20th century, group M lineages have spread heterogeneously throughout the world. Subtype C spread rapidly through sub-Saharan Africa and is currently the dominant HIV lineage worldwide. Yet the epidemiological and evolutionary circumstances that contributed to its epidemiologi...

Background Portugal has one of the most severe HIV-1 epidemics in Western Europe. Two subtypes circulate in parallel since the beginning of the epidemic. Comparing their transmission patterns and its association with transmitted drug resistance (TDR) is important to pinpoint transmission hotspots and to develop evidence-based treatment guidelines....

Background Portugal has one of the most severe HIV-1 epidemic in Western Europe. Two subtypes circulate in parallel since the beginning of the epidemic. Comparing their transmission patterns and its association with transmitted drug resistance (TDR) is important to pinpoint transmission hotspots and to develop evidence-based treatment guidelines....

Since HIV-1 treatment is increasingly considered an effective preventionstrategy, it is important to study local HIV-1 epidemics to formulate tailored preventionpolicies. The prevalence of HIV-1 in Cyprus was historically low until 2005. To investigatethe shift in epidemiological trends, we studied the transmission dynamics of HIV-1 in Cyprususing...

Objectives To identify the clinical and demographic characteristics of HIV‐positive and HIV‐negative women infected by multiple HPV types. Methods 1,399 women participated in the study (240 HIV‐positive and 1,159 HIV‐negative women). Samples were provided for Pap tests and for HPV detection and typing by PCR. Data were collected on HPV infection,...

The adaptive potential of HIV-1 is a vital mechanism to evade host immune responses and antiviral treatment. However, high evolutionary rates during persistent infection can impair transmission efficiency and alter disease progression in the new host, resulting in a delicate trade-off between within-host virulence and between-host infectiousness. T...

Background In-depth phylogeographic analysis can reveal migration patterns relevant for public health planning. Here, as a model, we focused on the provenance, in the current Italian HCV subtype 1a epidemic, of the NS3 resistance-associated variant (RAV) Q80K, known to interfere with the action of NS3/4A protease inhibitor simeprevir. HCV1a migrati...

Co-infections with HIV and HCV are very frequent among people who inject drugs (PWID). However, very few studies comparatively reconstructed the transmission patterns of both viruses in the same population. We have recruited 117 co-infected PWID during a recent HIV outbreak in Romania. Phylogenetic analyses were performed on HIV and HCV sequences i...

BEST HOPE is a project to construct a cohort of newly diagnosed HIV patients in Portugal: BEST HOPE aims are: 1) to analyze the prevalence and characteristics of TDR in newly diagnosed HIV patients, and 2) to describe and analyze risk factors associated with HIV infection and transmission of drug resistance in Portugal.

Angola borders and has long-term links with Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as well as high levels of Human Immunodeficiency virus (HIV) genetic diversity, indicating a potential role in the initial spread of the HIV-1 pandemic. Herein, we analyze 564 C2V3 and 354 pol publicly available sequences from DRC, Republic of Congo (RC) and Angola to be...

Objective: The latest NNRTI rilpivirine is indicated for HIV-1 patients initiating antiretroviral treatment, but the extent of genotypic rilpivirine resistance in treatment-naïve patients outside clinical trials is poorly defined. Study design: This retrospective observational study of clinical data from Belgium and Portugal evaluates genotypic...

The HIV pandemic is characterized by extensive genetic variability, which has challenged the development of HIV drugs and vaccines. Although HIV genomes have been classified into different types, groups, subtypes and recombinants, a comprehensive study that maps HIV genome-wide diversity at the population level is still lacking to date. This study...

Clinicians reported an increasing trend of rapid progression (RP) (AIDS within 3 years of infection) in Cuba. Recently infected patients were prospectively sampled, 52 RP at AIDS diagnosis (AIDS-RP) and 21 without AIDS in the same time frame (non-AIDS). 22 patients were sampled at AIDS diagnosis (chronic-AIDS) retrospectively assessed as > 3 years...

Background A key challenge in the field of HIV-1 protein evolution is the identification of coevolving amino acids at the molecular level. In the past decades, many sequence-based methods have been designed to detect position-specific coevolution within and between different proteins. However, an ensemble coevolution system that integrates differen...

We aimed to study epidemic trends and predictors for transmitted drug resistance (TDR) in our region, its clinical impact and its association with transmission clusters. We included 778 patients from the AIDS Reference Center in Leuven (Belgium) diagnosed from 1998 to 2012. Resistance testing was performed using population-based sequencing and TDR...

Background HIV infection leads to a decreasing immune response, thereby facilitating the appearance of other infections, one of the most important ones being HPV. However, studies are needed for determining associations between immunodeficiency caused by HIV and/or the presence of HPV during the course of cervical lesions and their degree of malign...

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the main risk factor associated with the development of cervical cancer (CC); however, there are other factors that favour the progression of the illness such as immunosuppression caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This study was thus aimed at evaluating the functionality of classical polymerase chain re...

Background: To investigate differences in pathogenesis, diagnosis and resistance pathways between HIV-1 subtypes, an accurate subtyping tool for large datasets is needed. We aimed to evaluate the performance of automated subtyping tools to classify the different subtypes and circulating recombinant forms using pol, the most sequenced region in cli...

Infection, coinfection and type-specific human papillomavirus (HPV) distribution was evaluated in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive women from paired cervical and urine samples. Paired cervical and urine samples (n = 204) were taken from HIV-positive women for identifying HPV-DNA presence by using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with thre...

Latin America and the Caribbean countries have increased the scaling-up of antiretroviral treatment in the last years. The increase of transmitted drug resistance has been feared due to the worrisome indicators associated with the emergence of drug resistance and monitored by the World Health Organization (WHO). Consequently, our aim was to review...

This is a longitudinal study performed ina 159 medicine student’s cohort, of fourth andninth study semester, in order to evaluate thevariation of Staphylococcus aureus carriers andits antimicrobial susceptibility on students, beforeand after clinical practice. Clinical sampleswere taken with a swab from the tonsils, pharynxposterior wall, nasal fos...