Polymorphisms associated with resistance to protease inhibitors in naïve patients infected with hepatitis C virus genotype 1 in Argentina: Low prevalence of Q80K

•A high prevalence of resistance-associated substitutions (RASs) was detected in HCV-1 from Argentinean naïve patients.•The prevalence of RASs was higher in HCV-1b than in HCV-1a.•A great prevalence of double mutants (17.2%) was detected in HCV-1b but not in HCV-1a.•Q80K polymorphism was not detected in patients carrying HCV-1a, even in patients belonging to clade 1.•The phylogenetic analysis showed that Argentinean samples were distributed randomly among sequences around the world.

Incorporation of direct acting antivirals (DAA) in the treatment of Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) significantly increases sustained virologic response rates. However, despite the greater potency offered by these antivirals, drug resistance plays a key role in patients with failure to DAA. Nevertheless, there is no information about the prevalence of resistance-associated substitutions (RASs) in Argentina.The aim of this study was to analyze HCV variants resistant to protease inhibitors (PI) in naïve patients infected with HCV genotype 1 from Argentina.In this retrospective cross-sectional study, 103 patients infected with HCV-1 were included. Eighteen positions related with RASs were analyzed by Sanger at baseline and phylogenetic analysis was performed to determine the diversification of this samples.The analyzed RASs were present in 38 out of 103 patients (36.9%) infected with HCV-1. Patients infected with subtype HCV-1b had higher prevalence of baseline RASs than patients infected with HCV-1a [51.6% vs. 12.8%, respectively (p < 0.001)]. The Q80K polymorphism was not found in HCV-1a samples, even when 51% of them belonged to cluster 1, which is associated with a high frequency of Q80K. Phylogenetic analysis showed that Argentinean samples were intermingled with sequences from other geographic regions.RASs to PI were highly prevalent and subtype dependent in treatment-naïve Argentinean patients. Surprisingly, Q80K polymorphism was not detected in our study population. The phylogenetic analysis showed no relationship between our samples and other samples from Brazil which also present a low prevalence of Q80K. This study supports the need for surveillance of resistance in patients who will be treated with DAA in each particular country since the observed RASs have very different prevalence worldwide.