Researchers in the United States (US) have reformulated an HIV medication that could eventually be taken once a year.
According to the findings of a new study published online in the journal ‘Nature Materials,’ the idea of the new medication is to free people from needing daily pills.
The work is in the early stages, having been studied in lab animals. But the goal is to create an HIV drug that can be injected annually — offering protection from infection or control of the virus in people who already have it.
The researchers, at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, started with a drug that is already in clinical trials, called Cabotegravir, which is an injection drug being developed for both HIV prevention and treatment, and designed to be given once every month or two.
The ‘Newsmax’ reported that the investigators chemically modified cabotegravir to become a ‘prodrug’ — an inert substance that, once in the body, is converted into an active form. In this case, that conversion happens gradually, with the drug being released for up to a year in lab animals.
Researcher, Dr. Howard Gendelman, said the study has not been conducted in humans, adding that it would be hard to predict how long it could take to move ahead.
Gendelman heads the department of pharmacology and experimental neuroscience at the Nebraska center.
He said: “We’re repurposing a medication that other people invented,” and there will be “multiple facets” to getting it into human trials.
Cabotegravir is an investigational new drug under development by North Carolina-based ViiV Healthcare for the treatment of HIV infection. It belongs to a relatively newer class of HIV drugs called integrase inhibitors and they work by blocking an enzyme, the virus needs to replicate itself and spread.
A prevention trial is underway to see if cabotegravir injections, every eight weeks, can lower infection rates among people at high risk of HIV.
Other trials are testing the drug for maintaining HIV suppression in people who’ve gotten the virus down to very low levels with standard medication; there it’s given in monthly injections along with another drug, called rilpivirine.
Gendelman said that while the Cabotegravir injections currently in trials could free people from daily pills, they would still require frequent doctor visits — and a regular jab into the buttocks muscle, which can be uncomfortable for days.
