Two injections per year of a medication currently used to treat HIV infections have been dramatically effective in preventing new infections in a study conducted among young women in Africa.
The biannual injection of the drug lenacapavir can provide complete protection against HIV infections, demonstrating 100% efficacy in trial data released by the pharmaceutical company Gilead and published on Wednesday (24) in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Among the more than 5,000 young women who participated in the trial in Africa and were seronegative, none of the participants who received lenacapavir biannually acquired an HIV infection during the study, according to results that were also presented at the International AIDS Conference in Munich.
The study, called the PURPOSE 1 study, involved adolescents and young women in South Africa and Uganda who were randomly assigned to receive lenacapavir injections every 26 weeks or daily oral HIV medications. Participants were unaware of which group they belonged to.
Researchers assessed how many HIV infections occurred over 26 weeks, and a total of 55 infections were observed: zero in the lenacapavir group and 55 in the daily HIV medication groups.
There is another ongoing study to learn more about the efficacy of prevention in men as well.
Lenacapavir is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of HIV infection in adults, in combination with other antiretroviral medications, and is estimated to cost over $40,000 per year at the manufacturer’s list price, or about $39,000 annually at wholesale.
Lenacapavir is not approved for HIV prevention anywhere in the world, but as it continues to be studied as a pre-exposure prophylaxis drug to prevent HIV infection, many questions arise regarding cost and consequently, access.
Source: CNN