BOSTON — Research suggests that a shot every one to three months may some day give an alternative to the daily pills that some people take now to cut their risk of getting HIV.
The experimental drug has only been tested for prevention in monkeys, but it protected them from infection in two studies reported at an AIDS conference Tuesday.
“This is the most exciting innovation in the field of HIV prevention that I’ve heard recently,” said Dr. Robert Grant, an AIDS expert at Gladstone Institutes, a foundation affiliated with the University of California-San Francisco.
“Both groups are showing 100 percent protection” with the drug, Grant said of the two groups of researchers. “If it works and proves to be safe, it would allow for HIV to be prevented with periodic injections, perhaps every three months.”
The new research tested a long-acting experimental drug made by GlaxoSmithKline. The studies tested it in macaques exposed to a human-monkey version of HIV.
In research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, monkeys who got a fake treatment were readily infected “but the animals that received the long-acting drug remained protected,” said study leader Gerardo Garcia-Lerma of the CDC. The results mirror what was seen in the CDC’s early research in monkeys on Truvada, the pill that’s available for HIV prevention now.
A second study was conducted by Chasity Andrews and others at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University in New York. Again, all animals given a fake treatment were quickly infected and those on the drug were all protected. A second study showed a single shot last about 10 weeks on average.