HIV - Novel NNRTIs address crucial unmet need

Treatment of HIV has come a long way since the discovery of the virus. Although no real cure has been found yet, the last few decades have seen the introduction of many classes of drugs that suppress the replication of the virus. As therapeutics have improved dramatically in terms of efficacy, safety and convenience, the bar for new drugs has been raised considerably.

Class drug resistance represents a major problem for the NNRTIs. The two late stage compounds, developed by Tibotec/J&J, address this issue, etravirine is the more advanced of the two, but rilpivirine convenient dosing schedule makes it the commercially more promising candidate.

New NRTIs in development have not generated much excitement in the HIV community since most of these compounds, including Avexa's apricitabine, Achillion's elvucitabine and Pharmasset's Racivir, have only made slow progress over the last few years.

Historically, emerging drug resistance may have signaled overall treatment failure and hastened the onset of AIDS. While newer classes of drugs will enable patients with complex drug resistance to continue with successful antiretroviral therapy, exactly how they will be incorporated into traditional HAART regimens remains unclear at this stage.

Read more...

• Commercial Insight: HIV (06/10/2008)
• HIV (20/05/2008)
• HIV Therapy (19/05/2008)

• Monoclonal Antibodies Report Part II (19/05/2008)
• Acute Stroke (19/05/2008)
• Antifungals (16/05/2008)

• Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma (16/05/2008)
• Multiple Myeloma (16/05/2008)
• Innovation in Drug Delivery (15/05/2008)
• Next-Generation Nutraceuticals (15/05/2008)
• Innovations in CNS (15/05/2008)
• Protein Engineering & Drug Design (14/05/2008)
• Winning Product Launch Strategies (14/05/2008)
• Drug Repositioning Strategies (14/05/2008)
• Outlook for RNAi (14/05/2008)

---