A new drug that may offer hope to people with drug-resistant HIV has been launched in the UK today.
The drug Fuzeon has been developed by Roche and is meant for patients who have stopped responding to existing treatments.
The first new class of HIV drugs for seven years works in a different way to existing drugs, blocking the virus and stopping it from entering healthy immune cells. Other drugs attack the virus only when it is inside these cells.
Research published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that HIV patients who took Fuzeon in combination with other drugs were twice as likely to achieve undetectable levels of the virus compared to those who did not take the drug.
Jack Summerside from the UK charity Terrence Higgins Trust told the BBC that Fuzeon is an important extra treatment. However he added: ‘It is costly and even more difficult to take than existing HIV medications. Science is still a long way from finding a cure for HIV.’
The drug has to be injected twice a day to prevent it being broken down by the digestive system. It must also be used in combination with other drugs to have maximum effect and is twice as expensive as existing drugs.
Figures suggest that as many as one in four newly-diagnosed HIV positive patients have strains resistant to existing drugs.
