Hope for once-a-day HIV pill
Friday June 29th, 2012
A new once-a-day pill for HIV infection has beaten conventional treatments in a series of trials, it was announced today.
The Quad pill combines four treatments including a new drug called elvitegravir, which is a kind of integrase inhibitor. A second drug call cobicistat plays a role in controlling the liver, enabling low doses of other drugs to be used.
Researchers report the findings of several studies of Quad in The Lancet today.
In North America some 700 patients were involved in comparing the treatment with a 2006 triple drug "gold standard", known as Atripla.
A second global trial involved just over 700 patients in 146 centres in Australia, Europe, Thailand and North America. In this study the drug was compared with a combination of four other popular drugs.
The aim of treatment was to reduce the virus to undetectable levels in the blood - and the Quad treatment achieved this for 88 to 90 per cent of patients. This was a few percentage points more than the other treatments, researchers report.
In the global study Quad reduced the proportion of patients stopping treatment because of side effects from 5.1 per cent to 3.7 per cent. But it was also linked to an increase in kidney complications.
Writing in the journal, Rik Schrijvers and Zeger Debyser from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium say the new pill "has high efficacy and a good tolerability profile, with the limitations of potential drug interactions and a need to be taken with food."
"The underrepresentation of women in these studies, and absence of long-term safety data (especially for renal toxic effects) and resistance data, warrant further research," they add.
Tags: Asia | Australia | Europe | Flu & Viruses | North America
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