JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Every person with HIV needs treatment for the rest of their life. For some, this means 10 or more drugs taken throughout each day. But as NPR's Gabrielle Emanuel reports, a study shows there's new hope for this group of patients.
GABRIELLE EMANUEL, BYLINE: Most HIV patients already take a single pill each day to keep the virus at bay or injections every two months. But researchers estimate tens of thousands of HIV patients in the U.S. are resistant to these treatments and many more globally. Chloe Orkin is a physician and a researcher at Queen Mary University of London. Many of her HIV patients were diagnosed in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
CHLOE ORKIN: While we were learning about how to treat HIV, and they had drugs that didn't work that well, and therefore they developed some resistance to these medications.
EMANUEL: She says this is inconvenient and feels unfair.
ORKIN: Science has moved on for everyone else except for them. They're like a forgotten population.
EMANUEL: Orkin says her patients find the multiple pills challenging. Some of the drugs have side effects and some patients are taking medications for other conditions that don't work well with the HIV drugs.
ORKIN: They keep asking, why can't I have a single pill? Can I have injections? And you have to keep saying no.
EMANUEL: Soon, the answer may be yes. Orkin's part of a team that tested a new pill taken just once a day. It's made by Gilead Sciences and combines two of their drugs into one tablet smaller than a multivitamin. Gilead supported the research, but it was done at more than 90 independent sites. The results were published in the medical journal, The Lancet.
ORKIN: The drug worked just as well as the complex regimen. And if it works in these people, then it really, really works.
EMANUEL: Another study presented this past week at a medical conference found this new pill is as good as the single tablet gold standard that's currently used. In South Africa, Linda-Gail Bekker directs the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the University of Cape Town. She wasn't involved in the study.
LINDA-GAIL BEKKER: I think this good news is terrific.
EMANUEL: She says the value of this new pill goes far beyond the longtime HIV survivors. There are 40 million people with HIV and Bekker says many of them will develop resistance in their lifetime. Plus, HIV is always mutating.
BEKKER: So we've got to be ahead of the game.
EMANUEL: She says this type of research that develops new drugs and new drug combinations is key. This pill could be available in many countries by the end of the year. Bekker says this past year has been a tough one with international aid cuts causing disruptions for HIV care and data systems. So she says it's a relief to get a bit of good HIV news. Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR News.
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