HIV fight advances with new drug cocktails, fresh vaccine hopes

Three decades after approval of the first-ever AIDS treatment, HIV medicine is seeing a new wave of innovation with improved drug cocktails and a novel experimental vaccine.

Antiretroviral preventing infection known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is growing hopes for an eventual "functional" cure that may keep the virus at bay without drugs.

"New products are needed. The Achilles heel for us is drug resistance because the virus is incredibly quick to mutate," Linda Gail Bekker said. The race for better and more convenient medicines has made HIV a rich battleground for drug companies such as Gilead Sciences and GlaxoSmithKline.

Both bictegravir and dolutegravir are so-called integrase inhibitors, a type of medicine that has proved extremely effective at blocking HIV. GSK, unveiled results of a 96-week study with a long-acting two-drug injection given every four or eight weeks using another integrate inhibitor, cabotegravir, that showed it worked as well and perhaps better than standard daily pills. It hopes to win approval for its first dual therapy - a tablet containing dolutegravir later this year.

It offers an option for people who do not want daily pills, which some experts think might be 10 to 20 per cent of the market. GSK also faces a rival in Merck & Co, is working on even long-lasting drug that could be use one day as an implant. "The battle will play from next year, but we feel in a strong position to defend the franchise that we have built up," he told Reuters.

Andrew Cheng said the rival combinations were very comparable and there would now be a shift in treatment to the newer, more effective therapies. Many experts believe a vaccine needed to shut down the threat from HIV, although decades of efforts to develop one have so far ended in disappointment.

Scientists are not giving up, however, and a new approach pioneered by Johnson & Johnson, working with U.S. government experts and others, is set to enter large Phase II-b trials later this year. Prime-boost vaccine in a trial involving thousands of patients in Africa comes after promising data presented in Paris on Monday, showing the two-component shot generated a good immune response

Researchers are looking for reductions in infection rates of at least 50 percent, and hopefully more. With 36.7 million people around the world infected with HIV and more than, half of them getting treatment is expected to last for life.

Paul Stoffels said. "The people who are infected today will need therapy for the next 30 to 50 years, so the science of treatment has to evolve - and the science of prevention has to evolve as well to stop the pool of patients growing."