HIV Digest	HIV Digest Archive

HIV's ability to mutate and become drug-resistant, together with the fact that patients are transmitting drug-resistant HIV, adds urgency to the race to find new therapies, according to researchers at the 12th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston.

Researchers reported promising new therapies seeking to be added to the list of 20 medications already used to control the virus.

The drug TMC-114 is manufactured by Tibotec, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson. The conference was told it suppressed HIV well in patients who have developed resistance while taking highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). In a study by Dr. Richard Haubrich of the University of California-San Diego and colleagues, 497 patients were given a new drug cocktail, all but about 100 of whom received varying doses of TMC-114-- a protease inhibitor-- along with the other drugs. Haubrich said the highest dose knocked the virus down to desirable levels.

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TMC 278, a second Tibotec drug, is a non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor. An international research team gave varying doses of the drug to 47 treatment-naďve HIV-infected men for one week. They found it suppressed the virus and allowed the immune system to recover. The team, led by Frank Goebel of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, is now testing it on patients whose current HAART regimens are not successful.

Merck's new drug L-000810810 is an integrase inhibitor, a class of drugs that prevent HIV from infecting new cells. Dr. Susan Little of the University of California-San Diego and colleagues studied the drug in 30 HIV-infected patients. The researchers reported that the drug worked effectively and safely in patients who had taken, then stopped, HAART, as well as in treatment-naďve patients.

Editor's Note: from Reuters