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Iain Clacher
with Rachel
Cook and Katrina Fox
The relatively side-effect free HIV drug raltegravir will soon be
available through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
The first of a promising new class of HIV
drugs with few reported side effects has been approved for Australian access though
the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
Known as raltegravir (an integrase inhibitor marketed as Isentress)
the drug is currently available only to people in whom HIV has grown resistant
to all other existing therapies.
“These are the people who have been excellent patients and have done
what was recommended, but they have suffered because we didn’t have the right
drugs,” Professor David Cooper, director of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology
and Clinical Research told MCV.
“This new drug and some of the other drugs
have been an amazing change for these people,” he continued. “It works by
blocking an enzyme that allows the virus to enter into the human genetic
material and stay there forever.”
Cooper said the drug’s manufacturer, Merck,
was sponsoring a study to see if people initiating anti-HIV treatments would
also benefit from raltegravir.
“If that looks good compared to the bog
standard treatments, there will be wider access, but that’s still a year or two
away,” he explained.
Cooper added that trials of the drug had
shown “remarkably few side-effects”.
“Most people - and we have 100 to 200 at St Vincent’s [Darlinghurst] - don’t seem to know they’re
taking it. Compared to protease inhibitors, which can cause a range of
gastro-intestinal problems and induce nausea, they are extremely well
tolerated, and nausea is one of the main reasons some people don’t stick to the
treatments,” Cooper concluded.
Brett Hayhoe, the president of People
Living with HIV/AIDS Victoria (PLWHA), told MCV
that raltegravir “looks very good”.
“One of the things we have found in the HIV
sector is that people with HIV have become drug resilient, and particular regimes
aren’t working for them anymore. We are finding with more and more of the new drugs
that are coming onto the market that more research has been done and there are
less side effects associated them,” he said.
The 450 Australians already obtaining the
drug free of charge through an expanded access program will be able to access
it through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) from August 1.
“Having [raltegravir] on the PBS makes them a lot more affordable to the majority of
HIV-positive people, remembering that a lot of HIV positive people are living
on or below the poverty line already and simply could not have access to these
drugs if they were not on the PBS,” Hayhoe concluded.
In related news, the NSW government is to provide $20 million towards the
establishment of a $120 million
state-of-the-art national HIV research centre in Sydney. The funding will help
establish the National Institute for
Virology, which will bring together 300 of the nation’s top scientists working on HIV/AIDS research.
“This facility…will consolidate the
world-class research capacity of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and
Clinical Research (NCHECR) in HIV research and medicine,” said NSW Premier
Morris Iemma.
The new institute will be located at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst.
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