I wrote Dr. Seymour the following. Last Friday I dispensed the most expensive prescription I have ever filled. The drug was Rebif, and for two 44mcg vials, the cost was $16,535.00. This bought to mind the monthly cost of the antiretrovirals used to treat HIV. This cost exceeds $5000.00 per month per patient. In excess of $60,000.00 a year not including other medications. I then wondered what would the cost of HIVCIDE be worth. His response. I thought it was closer to $25K/year but you would know better. Ijust saw an experimental gene therapy that allegedly prevents the transition from HIV to AIDS by altering the CCR5 receptors on the CD4/CD8 immune system cells. It's proposed as a one time treatment and the cost listed was $100K You would still have the virus and be able to transmit it but you yourself would not progress to AIDS. We have a better plan. We have already shown in two specialized animal trials that we were able to achieve a "functional cure". That's defined as dropping the viral load and the viral burden so low as to make transmissopn of the virus virtually impossible. I personally think that we might do better than that and completely eradicate the virus but that hypothesis has to be tesyed first in the SCID-Hu mouse model and then later in humans. How much would it be worth? Would insurance companies that are the hook for the yearly treatment costs pay an upfront fee to have the virus completely gone ? That's what the gene thearpy company is banking on. When the time is right the market will "speak" on the issue. Einstein's definition of idiocy was when did the same thing over and over and expected a different result. Sounds like the vaccine trials for HIV fall in that category. People ask me all the time when we're going to bring the HIV drug into trials. Simple answer is this...get the influenza drug into the FDA first since that requires us to do all the structural things necessary for HIVCide or any other drug. Get the cGMP built and commissioned. Then we can build any of our drugs under conditions necessary for approval. I feel that successful human trials for FluCide whereever they be done, will move the stock and ebable us to move to a bational exchange. That move alone will attract more investors and enable us to expand our production capacity in order to move other drugs into the system.
