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news.Patients starting HIV treatment with Roche's protease inhibitor, Invirase, boosted with a small dose of ritonavir, show no significant resistance to protease inhibitors, according a study presented at the 3rd International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis and Treatment.
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These data are important to physicians and patients because resistance to treatment is one of the major challenges in trying to control HIV/AIDS. The virus can become resistant to an anti-HIV drug, or combinations of drugs, because it reproduces at such a rapid rate that mutations occur, allowing the virus to partly, or fully, resist the effects of treatment.
“These data show that early treatment with Invirase resulted in an outstanding level of HIV suppression without the development of significant protease inhibitor resistance,” said lead investigator Dr Jintanat Ananworanich, of the HIV Netherlands Australia Thailand Research Collaboration, Bangkok.
The study eclipses previous limited data from tests that suggested that patients may develop resistance in response to the treatment.
In December 2004, Roche received approval from the FDA of a new 500mg film-coated tablet formulation of Invirase, designed for use in combination with a small dose of ritonavir and other anti-HIV drugs for the treatment of HIV infection. The new formulation of Invirase, which was approved under a six-month priority FDA review, reduces pill count for each dose by more than half (from five pills to two, twice-daily) compared to the Invirase 200 mg capsules.