I really don't think TaiMed is competition for PRO 140. TaiMed is going to have the MDR market almost exclusively to itself for several years at least. If PRO 140 and Ibalizumab are ever related, it would likely be for those patients who have become resistant to everything and both drugs would be used together.
PRO 140 will not be a factor in the MDR market which their combo therapy study seems to be targeting. First, PRO 140 only works on the C5 version of the disease and only 20-30%, at best, of the MDR patients are C5. Ibalizumab works on both major HIV tropisms (C4 and C5). Moreover, Mariviroc is already on the market and it works only on C5, so that is really more PRO 140's competition. It is also why it has been so hard to fill the combo trial up since doctors have MDR patients with the C5 tropism already on Mariviroc and the protocol for the combo trial says the patients could not have already used Mariviroc - so it has been very difficult to identify such patients. Furthermore, Ibalizumab will soak up the majority of the MDR patients before PRO 140 even reaches the market. Now, there will always be some patients for PRO 140, laggards and those for whom Ibalizumab does not work are candidates, but that will probably be too small of a number of patients for PRO 140 to be able to recruit a marketing partner for MDR. So, the combo trial's value is primarily to get the data for a Breakthrough Therapy Designation which will help CYDY raise the needed funds for the mono trial, where they really do have a lot of potential, partly because a much higher percentage of the non-MDR HIV market has the C5 version of the disease.
Ibalizumab, or more likely its next version, may one day be competition for PRO 140 outside the MDR market, but that is years away.
IV administration is easy for almost everyone as you well know. If it were not, there would be a lot more people dying in our hospitals. It is certainly more of a hassle than SC, but if you have MDR, it is the least of your worries. Also, Ibalizumab will likely be available via IM injection about a year after it launches in IV form.
You are right that the combo therapy results are the only important thing right now. And there is no reason to believe they will not be good enough.That should allow the company to raise additional funds and keep the ship afloat until the mono results are available. And if those are good, that is huge. And I see no reason why they would not be good. So CYDY has an interesting future, but it is in the mono market, not the MDR market.
