HIV prevention could soon become a whole lot simpler, especially for people who face challenges in taking or accessing a daily regimen of PrEP medication.
On Monday, GlaxoSmithKline announced that its new, injectable, long-lasting antiretroviral drug called cabotegravir had been shown in a large-scale study to be more effective in curbing HIV infections than Truvada, presently the most popular form of PrEP. The study included over 4500 cisgender men who have sex with men and transgender women who have sex with men in several countries.
The study, conducted by the HIV Prevention Trials Network, found that cabotegravir is both a safe and effective alternative to once-daily PrEP that may also benefit those who would prefer a more discreet form of the HIV prevention regimen. Cabotegravir is injected in patients once every two months.
“This is a breakthrough that will have a significant impact on the lives of gay men and other men who have sex with men and transgender women when they are at higher risk of HIV infection.” said Shannon Hader, Deputy Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in a statement. “We are particularly pleased that the study met its targets to recruit substantial numbers of younger black men who have sex with men and transgender women, the very people for whom accessing effective HIV prevention still remains a huge challenge.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2018, gay and bisexual men accounted for 69% of all HIV diagnoses in the United States and 86% of diagnoses among males. During that same year, Black gay and bisexual men accounted for nearly than 9,500 HIV diagnoses, followed by Latinx men with roughly 7,500 and white gay and bisexual men with about 6,400 new cases. Among all gay and bisexual men, the CDC estimates, HIV diagnoses remained stable between 2010 and 2017, but trends varied by race and ethnicity. In particular, infections among Latinx men increased by 18 percent between 2014 and 2017, and rose dramatically by 38 percent for gay and bisexual Black men between the ages of 25 and 34.
The announcement of the injectable PrEP study results comes on the heels of World AIDS Vaccine Day, which has been observed by advocates and researchers for more than 20 years as an occasion to promote the urgent need of a vaccine to help prevent and eradicate HIV infections.
“Until we have a safe and effective vaccine for HIV, we must continue to find innovative prevention strategies,” said Myron Cohen, M.D., HPTN co-principal investigator and director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “Increasing the number of effective tools will give people who want to prevent HIV an opportunity to find a method that works for them.”
According to AVAC, a group that promotes the ethical development and global delivery of HIV prevention tools, the development of an HIV vaccine may also be informing the critical push for a COVID-19 vaccine in the wake of the pandemic.
“If researchers achieve their goal of making the search for a COVID-19 vaccine the fastest vaccine development effort in history, much of that success will be due to the research knowledge, vaccine platforms, trial networks and community engagement models created through HIV vaccine research,” AVAC said in a resource guide about the HIV and COVID-19 vaccine pipelines. A number of innovations advocated for in HIV vaccine development, the group said, have been employed in the COVID-19 response, including running certain clinical trials in parallel instead of sequentially, gearing up manufacturing capacity before final study results are in, and negotiating public and private commitments in advance to facilitate sustainable access to new vaccines.
