Featured news from NHIVNA
HIV-related news from NAM
Novel two-drug maintenance combination works at least as well as triple therapy: stage set for long-lasting injectable formulation
Gus Cairns, 2014-03-08 10:00:00
An oral combination therapy of two antiretroviral drugs, the non-nucleoside rilpivirine (Edurant, also in Eviplera/Complera) and the new integrase inhibitor GSK1265744 (744), was at least as effective as a standard nucleosides-plus-efavirenz triple combination in keeping viral load undetectable in people taking it, the 21st Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) heard on Wednesday.
The dual combination was a maintenance therapy. This means patients did not start on it as their first treatment combination, but switched to it after six months on an NRTI-plus-744 combination, as long as they had a viral load under 50 copies/ml. The reason for this is that there has been a raised risk of early failure in rilpivirine-based combinations in people with high viral loads (over 100,000 copes/ml) in some drug trials, so the idea was not to start the two-drug combination until participants in the study had already achieved virological suppression.
The point of doing this study is explained in its title – the Long-Acting antiretroviral Treatment Enabling study, or LATTE for short. Rilpivirine and 744 remain so long in the body that the potential exists for them to be used as injectable formulations that could be administered once a month instead of taking pills. Now we know they are safe to use together as an oral maintenance therapy, there will be a new trial of them as an injected maintenance therapy. The conference heard on Tuesday how an injectable formulation of 744 was being developed for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).
Source:1
