The effectiveness of the drug is already close to that of the HIV vaccine, but its accessibility worries researchers.
New The HIV drug lenacapavir provides 100% protection against HIV infection based on human trials.
Two injections a year are enough for full protection. This is a marked difference from current treatments that require daily pills.
Currently, however, the new drug costs tens of thousands of dollars. The price is unnecessarily high, say the researchers who investigated the matter, according to news agency AFP.
A year’s treatment with the drug currently costs about $40,000, while according to the researchers, it could be obtained for $40.
Lenacapavir– the medicine is of Gilead Sciences developed by
The company published preliminary results in June from its clinical trials in Uganda and South Africa. On Wednesday, the results of the tests were published in the peer-reviewed journal The New England Journal of Medicine in the journal.
None of the 2,134 women who received lenacapavir became infected with HIV. Of the 1,068 women who took Truvada, a daily pill available for a decade, 16 became infected with HIV.
The protection provided by lenacapavir was so significant that, on the recommendation of an independent patient safety monitoring body, the trials were stopped, and the new drug was also offered to those in the control group.
“It basically does the same thing as the vaccine,” a researcher at the University of Liverpool Andrew Hill says news agency AFP.
Lenacapavir is given as an injection twice a year.
A year treatment with lenacapavir currently costs 42,250 dollars, i.e. about 38,970 euros in, for example, the United States, France, Norway and Australia.
Hill and his research colleagues presented their research at the international AIDS conference on how much the price of the drug would decrease if the pharmaceutical company Gilead allowed the manufacture of parallel preparations of the drug.
According to AFP, a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed states that a year’s dose could be prepared for 40 dollars, or about 37 euros.
Calculations based on lenacapavir ingredients and production costs. The result has been calculated so that there would be 10 million annual users and a profit of 30 percent would remain from the sale of the drug.
Hill notes that an international group of researchers has previously made similar assessments, which have also later proven to be correct.
A decade ago, researchers noted that the price of Gilead’s hepatitis C drug, which at the time cost $84,000 per patient, could drop to $100 if generics were allowed.
“Now it costs less than $40 to cure hepatitis C,” Hill says, according to AFP.
YK:n subordinate Director of UNAIDS Winnie the Pooh has demanded the pharmaceutical company Gilead to make leacapavir part of the drug patent pool MPP.
This would allow the drug to be sold under license in low- and middle-income countries, where, for example, the British newspaper The Guardianin including 95 percent of all HIV infections.
Similar mechanisms, in which wealthy countries pay higher prices than poorer ones, have been in use in the HIV treatment market for decades.
If this is not possible, according to Hill, countries could allow the manufacture of parallel products with the help of possible mandatory licenses.
Gilead Corporation has stated, according to The Guardian and AFP, that for now it is “too early” to assess the price and future of the drug.
The company promises, according to AFP, that it has a strategy to get “high-quality and affordable versions” of the drug to countries where “the need is greatest.”
According to The Guardian, Hill considers it important that all low- and middle-income countries receive affordable generics.
Syringes at an HIV clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa in November 2014.
Young representative of Y+ Global, a network of HIV carriers Joyce Ouma says, according to The Guardian, that the twice-yearly injectable drug would make a huge difference to young people like him who are living with or at risk of HIV infection.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that the eradication of new HIV infections by 2030 depends on whether Gilead ensures that the global south has a fair chance to receive lenacapavir,” says Ouma.
Over here the results published to date on the drug’s effectiveness concern cis women, i.e. women identified as female at birth.
According to Gilead trials are now underway in which the drug is tested on cis men who have sex with cis men, trans men, trans women and people of the opposite sex.
Research is conducted in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Thailand and the United States.
The results are expected at the end of this year or at the beginning of 2025.