Europeans eye new drug cocktails
Gilden, D.
Gmhc Treatment Issues the Gay Men's Health Crisis Newsletter of Experimental Aids Therapies 10(12): 1-4
1996
ISSN/ISBN: 1077-1824 PMID: 11364015 Document Number: 461204
Controversies on the use of new anti-HIV combination therapies from the European point of view were presented at the Third International Conference on Drug Therapy in HIV Infection. Treatment strategies varied between countries, with Dutch health authorities agreeing to fund treatment with protease inhibitors for early HIV infection. Conversely, the British treatment patterns are the most conservative, providing Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia prophylaxis when a patient presented with a CD4 count under 190. Viral load technologies are assessing lymph node biopsies in patients on anti-HIV drugs. Results of these biopsies have shown undetectable viral load, although the limit of detection of the bDNA assay used was 10,000 copies of HIV RNA per milligram of tissue. Protease inhibitor combinations may further drop viral load in comparison to traditionally-used anti-HIV drug combinations. More sensitive viral load assays need to be used to determine the effect of the new combinations on viral load. Researchers developing the protease inhibitor nelfinavir claim that cross resistance between it and other protease inhibitors rarely occurs.