The last decade has marked a major improvement in the treatment of HIV positive patients thanks to the highly active anti-retroviral treatment (HAART) consisting of a cocktail of reverse transcriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitors. Nevertheless, the emergence of multi-resistant viruses continues to challenge the clinical community.
The resistance to protease inhibitors is mainly due to the appearance of mutations in the virus, particularly in the protease gene. The resistant mutations to marketed protease inhibitors most likely result from the prolonged use of these drugs in the HIV positive patients.
For this reason, new antiviral drugs with a high genetic barrier (more difficult for the virus to develop resistance) need to be developed to fight the emergence of resistant HIV viruses.
“We have now a high degree of confidence that when used in the clinical setting, PPL-100 will potentially have a high genetic barrier and hence give a lower chance for resistant HIV strains to arise,” said Hans Mader, president and CEO of Procyon Biopharma. “We plan to file for the first-in-man phase I study this month and expect to have results available within the next 4 to 5 months.”