New Delhi: US doctors have arrived at two new drugs, each of which works in a novel way to fight the HIV virus.
The two drugs, which could be approved for marketing later this year, would add two new classes of drugs to the four that are available to battle HIV, the AIDS virus. That would be especially important to tens of thousands of patients in the United States whose treatment is failing because their virus has become resistant to drugs already in use.
“This is really a remarkable development in the field,” Dr. John W Mellors of the University of Pittsburgh was quoted by The New York Times.
Dr Mellors said he “wouldn’t be going out on a limb” to say the new results were as exciting as those from the mid-1990s, when researchers first discovered that cocktails of drugs could significantly prolong lives.
Dr Scott Hammer, chief of infectious diseases at Columbia University Medical Center, agreed that the new drugs “will provide extended years of meaningful survival to patients.”
One drug, maraviroc, was developed by Pfizer, which has already applied for approval to sell it. The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled an advisory committee meeting on April 24 to discuss the application. The other drug, raltegravir, was developed by Merck, which has said it will apply in the second quarter for approval.
Experts said the new drugs would be used in combination with older drugs. Both drugs stem from scientific findings made a decade or more ago that have peeled back the intricate molecular process used by H.I.V. to infect human immune system cells and to replicate themselves.
With excerpts from The New York Times
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