New Treatment Guidelines Support Use of FUZEON(R) to Achieve Undetectable HIV in Treatment-Experienced Patients
Monday August 14, 10:59 am ET
TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 14, 2006--Newly updated HIV/AIDS treatment guidelines, issued by the International AIDS Society-USA and published in this week's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, support important changes for the management of treatment-experienced patients. They recommend for the first time that the goal of therapy in heavily treatment-experienced patients should be to achieve undetectable levels of HIV (less than 50 copies/mL), and highlight the results from several pivotal studies with newer anti-HIV treatments, such as darunavir and tipranavir, in which concomitant use of FUZEON was associated with a significantly greater likelihood of achieving this result. FUZEON, the first and only fusion inhibitor available for the treatment of HIV, was co-developed by Roche and Trimeris (Nasdaq: TRMS - News). The revised IAS-USA guidelines were released in a news conference at the XVI International AIDS Conference, being held this week in Toronto.
"Maintaining undetectable viral load is the best way to achieve long-term treatment success in HIV," said Dr. Julio S.G. Montaner, president-elect of the International AIDS Society and a member of the IAS-USA panel that drafted the updated guidelines. "Today using FUZEON with darunavir or tipranavir, we have the right drugs to help us achieve this goal for treatment-experienced patients. The new IAS-USA guidelines clearly support this approach."
Detectable HIV can lead to drug resistance, and recent research shows 66 percent of HIV patients in the U.S. have detectable viral levels. In order to combat these rates of resistance and improve the chances of reaching undetectable - which has been shown to improve clinical outcomes - the newly-issued guidelines recognize that patients need the full potency of at least two fully active drugs, such as FUZEON and a newer boosted protease inhibitor. Prior to the simultaneous availability of these drugs which retain activity against drug-resistant virus, achieving undetectable in a significant number of heavily treatment-experienced patients was not possible.
"This concept of the significance of getting HIV to under 50 copies/mL is not complicated. If viral load is over 50 copies/mL, resistance can develop, leading to a deterioration in immune function and eventually resulting in disease progression," said Jules Levin, founder and Executive Director, National AIDS Treatment Advocacy Project (NATAP). "Now that the IAS-USA guidelines have been updated, doctors must aim for an undetectable viral load if they have the drugs available - none of us should be complacent."
