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EU to approve one-pill-a-day treatment for HIV patients
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Marianne Barriaux
The Guardian,
Monday December 17 2007
The EU is expected to approve the first one-a-day combination drug to treat HIV this week, at a time when infection rates in Europe are rising.
The pill, called Atripla, is to be marketed by Gilead Sciences, a US biopharmaceutical company, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, the US drug group. It marks a significant change in the treatment of the disease.
Just a few years ago, patients were often forced to swallow up to 30 pills a day, and these frequently caused serious side-effects. In the past few years, there has been significant progress. GlaxoSmithKline's Trizivir, for example, an existing combination treatment, has to be taken just twice a day. The current leading treatment in Europe - Truvada and Sustiva - also involves two different pills.
Atripla is the first one-pill, one-a-day medicine. It combines the active ingredients of three widely used antiretroviral drugs (Sustiva, Emtriva and Viread) in one pill and has a good safety profile.
It was launched in the US in July 2006. Sales of the drug reached nearly $650m (325m) in the first nine months of 2007 and industry analysts project that Atripla's annual sales will grow to $2.7bn by 2010, eventually peaking at close to $4bn.
Public awareness of Aids has fallen slightly in Europe as the disease has become a chronic, manageable condition thanks to scientific progress. It is no longer a death sentence, providing it is caught early.
Mike Ward, an analyst at the life-sciences investment bank Nomura Code, said: "It used to be that a person would be diagnosed, and two years later they were dead. Now, it's a long-term condition, but still with a lot of managing involved."
Paul Carter, vice-president of international commercial operations at Gilead, said: "We're trying to work with policy-makers and opinion leaders in the HIV field to raise awareness that infection rates are increasing in Europe."
According to EuroHIV data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the rate of new HIV infection in the European Union has almost doubled since 1999, from 28.8 to 57.5 per million inhabitants. UNAIDS says that about 2.4 million people are living with HIV in the region. In 2005, an estimated 300,000 new infections occurred in Europe.
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