Advertise With UsAdvertise on our extensive network of industry websites and newsletters.
Get the PBR newsletterSign up to our free email to get all the latest PBR
news.During the world's largest HIV/AIDS congress in Toronto, Canada, new guidelines from the influential International AIDS Society have been published supporting important changes for the management of treatment-experienced patients and recommending Roche and Trimeris' Fuzeon.
Subscribe to our email newsletter
The guidelines provide clear guidance that physicians should set a treatment goal of reaching undetectable levels of the virus (less than 50 copies/mL) for all HIV patients, including treatment-experienced patients. Furthermore, in the opinion of the panel, the best way to achieve this goal, in this difficult-to-treat clinical patient population, is to combine Roche and Trimeris’ Fuzeon with new HIV agents such as darunavir boosted with low-dose ritonavir (darunavir/r) or tipranavir boosted with low-dose ritonavir (tipranavir/r).
Recent clinical trials have convinced the authors of the guidelines that undetectable viral load should be the goal for all treatment-experienced patients. These trials, including POWER and RESIST, confirm the efficacy of the new drugs darunavir (marketed by Tibotec as Prezista) and tipranavir (marketed by Boehringer Ingelheim as Aptivus), and emphasize that Fuzeon should be the cornerstone to achieve undetectable levels of virus for treatment-experienced patients.
The significant antiviral effect achieved by adding Fuzeon to other new HIV drugs, known as the ‘Fuzeon effect’, has been consistently demonstrated across a number of studies.
As physicians and patients await news on the latest developments in drugs from new classes of HIV medicines such as the integrase inhibitors and CCR5 inhibitors, it is expected that Fuzeon can be combined with these new investigational drugs to help ensure that treatment-experienced patients stay one step ahead of the rapidly mutating HIV virus.