| ■ Two HIV/AIDS Drugs Offer New Options for Patients | 07.03.12 |
| Two new HIV/AIDS drugs that proved safe and highly effective in clinical trials could offer important new treatment options for patients, experts said at the 14th Annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections held in Los Angeles. The drugs -- Pfizer's maraviroc and Merck's raltegravir -- would add two new classes of drugs to the four currently available to fight HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, The New York Times reported. Both drugs could receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration later this year. If approved, these drug could prove especially important to tens of thousands of patients in the United States infected with HIV that has become resistant to current drugs. "This is a really remarkable development in the field," Dr. John W. Mellors of the University of Pittsburgh said at a news conference at the meeting. Mellors, who was not involved in the studies on the two new drugs but has been a consultant to Merck and Pfizer, compared the findings from the clinical trials on the two drugs to the discovery in the mid-1990s that a cocktail of drugs could significantly extend the lives of HIV patients, The Times reported. |