HIV Antiretroviral Treatment Improving, with Fewer Side Effects

Antiretroviral drugs have helped those infected with HIV live longer and fuller lives, helping its patients maintain their infection and releasing AIDS of its death sentence status; however, the drugs that comprise the antiretroviral treatment are extremely strong and often carry intimidating side effects, which had some researchers wondering if perhaps newly infected patients should hold off on starting a drug treatment so soon after diagnosis. The debate has gone back and forth, but there may be some hope on the horizon. The pharmaceutical company that has recently had two new HIV drugs approved is reporting that they have fewer serious side effects than the drugs currently on the market.

These two new drugs were approved for those infected patients who were beginning to develop a resistance to their normal drug cocktails and also for any newly infected patients. These claims were made at a conference held in Washington, D.C. for specialists in the field of infectious diseases. Dr. Robin Isaacs, an executive director at Merck & Co, the company that funded the studies, stated, “There was a desperate unmet medical need for those patients who had failed other therapies.” The drugs that were studied were Isentress (developed by Merck & Co) and Selzentry (developed by Pfizer Inc.); they join three other drugs that might be more easily tolerated by patients, including Aptivus (developed by Boehringer Ingelheim), Prezista and Intelence (both developed by Johnson & Johnson). Isaacs went on to say, “They have all these different options now, which they didn’t before, to build new successful regimens.”

Merck & Co are hoping that Isentress will be granted first-line approval very soon; being an integrase inhibitor, it is the only one of its kind currently being offered. The drug works by stopping the integrase enzyme; this enzyme is responsible for putting HIV’s DNA within a patient’s cells and multiplying the virus. The study sponsored by Merck & Co surveyed over 550 patients. One half of these patients were given Sustiva (developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co) and the other half was given Isentress. Both sets of patients also took the Truvada drug as part of their treatment. While both sets of patients had similar levels of the virus after 48 weeks, only 44 percent of those patients that took Isentress reported serious side effects compared to 77 percent of those patients taking Sustiva.

Pfizer Inc had its own study done for its drug Selzentry. In this similar study surveying over 400 patients over 48 weeks, half of the patients received Selzentry and Combivir and the other half of the patients received Sustiva and Combivir. Again, the virus levels were similar, but of those patients receiving Selzentry, only 4 percent reported side effects serious enough to stop the drug treatment compared to 14.2 percent of those taking Sustiva. The Selzentry drug helps patients protect their immune system from the virus by essentially inhibiting or “closing the door” known as the CCR5 co-receptor.