Researchers announce new shot for HIV

A single shot every two months prevents HIV better than the most commonly used daily pill, Truvada, researchers reported Tuesday.

At the moment, Truvada and Descovy, made by Gilead Sciences, are the only drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for prevention of HIV infection, a strategy called PrEP. Gilead has heavily been criticized for setting a high price for the pills.

Additional options for prevention are sorely needed, to say nothing of a cure. About 1.7 million people became infected with HIV in 2019, bringing the global total to 38 million.

Many people are unable or unwilling to take a daily pill to prevent HIV infection, particularly in low-income countries where the coronavirus pandemic is disrupting services and access to antiretroviral drugs.

“I think it’s revolutionary,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, a researcher at Harvard University, said of the findings.

“It’s exciting to have another pharma company in the PrEP mix,” she added. “This will create competition and ideally drives costs down.”

The findings were presented at the AIDS 2020 conference, held virtually this year because of the pandemic. The randomized, doubleblind trial of the drug, called cabotegravir, was conducted by the HIV Prevention Trials Network, a scientific collaborative. The trial included nearly 4,600 cisgender men and transgender women who have sex with men and was conducted at 43 sites in seven countries.

Each of the participants got a shot every two months, either cabotegravir or a placebo. Each participant also took either Truvada or a placebo pill every day.

The trial was expected to continue well into 2022, but it was stopped in May after an interim analysis showed that cabotegravir was highly effective.

In the final analysis, 13 participants who got the injections every eight weeks were infected with HIV, compared with 39 who were infected among those who took the daily pill.