A recent study reveals that a long-acting HIV treatment works just as well as daily pills. A monthly injection could free patients from heavy daily medication.
Long-acting medications are just as effective as three pills a day in maintaining viral suppression of HIV-1. These are the results of two twin studies devoted to the treatment of AIDS, presented on March 7 at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle, Washington, and taken up by the Nature International journal of science. For this research, more than 1,000 people from 16 countries participated. The researchers claim that the long-acting medications could allow the vast majority of people on prescription antiretrovirals to effectively suppress the viral load of the virus.
A combination of cabotegravir and rilpivirine
The antiretroviral injections tested in trials include a mixture of cabotegravir and rilpivirine. The drugs stay in the tissues and dissolve over weeks. The combination was developed by ViiV Healthcare, a London pharmaceutical company spun off from pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer.
The clinical trials were carried out in two simultaneous parts. One of the trials compared the virus levels in blood samples from 556 HIV-positive people who had never taken antiretroviral drugs before the study. For 11 months, participants took either monthly injections, or daily doses of three common antiretroviral pills. The other trial recruited 616 people who had been taking the standard combination of antiretroviral pills for at least six months before the start of the study. They also received either monthly injections or three daily pills. In the end, not only the injections made it possible to control HIV as effectively as the pills in both studies, but in each study more than 85% of participants said they preferred the monthly regimen.
A breakthrough in the fight against AIDS
The researchers hope that this drug will solve one of the most difficult challenges in the fight against HIV: making all traces of the virus disappear from patients who take their treatment. Even today, forgotten pills put the people with HIV and their high-risk sexual partners. However, this method could prevent these oversights by simplifying the lives of these people: for Chloe Orkin, researcher on HIV at Queen Mary University of London, who presented the project: “Instead of remembering that you have HIV 365 days a year, it’s down to just 12 days,” she says. “It gives patients a kind of freedom.”
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