Patients with AIDS in China will have a new treatment option when the country’s first long-acting injectable drug for the disease hits the market next month.
Developed by China’s Frontier Biotech, albuvirtide will only need to be injected once a week in conjunction with other treatments that prevent the growth of HIV. It also has fewer side effects on the liver, says Wu Hao, an AIDS/HIV expert who leads the infection center at Beijing You’an Hospital. Current options require patients to take a cocktail of pills once or twice a day, and side effects can include kidney or liver failure.
The new medicine could be good news to the over 700,000 people who are HIV-positive in the country. Though treatment costs can add up in the US and Europe, China has provided free antiretroviral treatment to patients since June 2016. Priced medications are also available on the Chinese market, such as one by GlaxoSmithKline that allows patients to take a single pill instead.
For the most part, HIV drugs are either imported or generic, and choices are restricted compared with those in the US or Europe. But albuvirtide could signal a growing shift toward innovation in domestic biotech and pharmaceuticals.
In recent years, local firms have made headway in developing drugs, often through collaboration with companies based elsewhere. The lung-cancer drug icotinib, for example, was developed by Betta Pharmaceuticals in east China’s Hangzhou, but the compound was discovered by Beta Pharma in the US.
Albuvirtide, however, is the “first new HIV medicine discovered and developed in China,” Frontier Biotech said in a June press release. It is only the second long-acting drug in the world, meaning it only needs to be injected once a week. The Chinese company also has the global IP rights, it stated.
Several Chinese companies have developed long-acting HIV treatments, but only albuvirtide has been approved so far, according to the Global Times citing the Xinhua News Agency.
Chinese authorities have launched campaigns against AIDS in the past few years, with the goal of reducing HIV infections and related deaths, as well as raising awareness to end discrimination against those affected.
