From TheBodyPro…
As 2020 draws to a close, we asked David Alain Wohl, M.D., a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina and a highly respected HIV clinician-researcher, to take stock of the year’s most momentous research developments and other critical events. In this exclusive series of articles, Wohl calls attention to 10 such developments that have tremendous short-term implications for our day-to-day efforts to improve HIV prevention, treatment, patient care, and policy in the U.S., and analyzes each development with his trademark wit and clinical savvy.
For those with few antiretroviral options, who are downing multiple pills to keep multidrug-resistant virus from replicating, the answer would be yes: We do need another antiretroviral hero.
Fortunately, the number of people living with HIV who are heavily treatment experienced and have few remaining antiretroviral options is fairly small. Among over 27,000 HIV-positive people in the U.S. who were treatment experienced and in care at one of the HIV clinics contributing to the U.S. Centers of AIDS Research Network of Integrated Clinical Systems (CNICS) cohort from 2000 to 2017, just 916 had limited treatment options (LTO)—a status defined as having two or fewer available antiretroviral classes, as well as two or fewer active drugs per class as determined by resistance testing. After 2007, the proportion of people with LTO fell; it has since remained less than 1% of the cohort’s antiretroviral experienced patients.
Still, for that 1%, things can be rough. Many are straddled with antiretroviral regimens that include pharmacological boosters, inconvenient dosing, and side effects. Some may even still fail to achieve virologic suppression. Therefore, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of fostemsavir (brand name: Rukobia), an HIV attachment inhibitor, in July is welcome news to these patients and their providers.