Studies show new drug can help AIDS patients

? A new drug that attacks the AIDS virus in a new way could dramatically restore the health of HIV patients whose infections have outfoxed all existing medicines, research indicates.

Studies presented Monday at the 14th International AIDS Conference found that patients for whom current drugs had stopped working were twice as likely to have virus concentrations decrease below detectable levels if they added the new medicine, known as enfuvirtide, or T-20, to their cocktail.

Experts said the drug, expected to be on the market next year, could save the lives of people who have exhausted treatment options.

“If you have multiple drug resistant virus, the disease will progress. We have plenty of patients that are dying with multidrug resistant virus,” said Dr. Robert Siliciano, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, who was not connected with the study.

“We have people lining up, waiting for this drug to become available.”

Previous studies have estimated about 15 percent of HIV patients have virus strains that are immune to all current types of drugs.

James Locke, 50, of London, was one such patient. He contracted HIV in 1984 and by the mid-1990s, his virus started to show resistance. By 2000, the side effects of the drugs were so bad he had to stop taking them. In April of that year, he enrolled in the T-20 study.

“It was really quite remarkable. Within three months my viral load dropped substantially, to the point of almost undetectable,” Locke said.

Current HIV drugs block either of two substances the virus uses to make new copies of itself once it is inside a blood cell. Over the last seven years, those drugs have turned HIV infection from a death sentence into a manageable chronic disease, but scientists say the medicines are losing their power as the virus develops mutant varieties.

T-20 is the most advanced experimental drug in a new class of AIDS medicines, called entry inhibitors, which attack the virus by preventing it from getting into the blood cells it kills.

The drug is being developed by Trimeris Inc., a small North Carolina biotechnology company, and Swiss pharmaceutical firm Roche.