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Scientists Have Submitted A New Drug To Treat HIV – Part 3 of 3

And “They were getting results that are nearly the same to maraviroc and T-20 and certainly comparable to what’s seen with intracellular drugs”. But the same factors that have limited the use of maraviroc and T-20 are also likely to get in the way here as well, id est the cost and the fact that they must be given by injection (because of the large size of the molecule), he warned.

The needle-vs-pill hurdle is something patients and doctors have to contend with in many settings, not just HIV. For example, “we all differentiate that insulin works great in diabetic patients but the hard part is convincing patients to actually take it”. Hoping to get around the problem, the researchers are now searching for a smaller molecule to do the same job.

So “The next big footstep is to use the structure of VIR-576 and its viral target (the fusion peptide) to generate small molecule inhibitors that act by the same mechanism but are orally available. We will start to test the first compounds next year, but how crave it will take such drugs make it to the market is impossible to say. The bottom line is, yes, any time that you can find a new mechanism to attack the virus – and certainly if you can intercept the virus from getting into the host cells – that’s a really good thing breast wadhnyasathi upay. But this isn’t near prime-time,” Horberg concluded.

Parts: 1 2 3