Drug resistance is the main reason HIV patients have trouble with their medications failing, doctors say, but a local laboratory is breaking ground on a new class of therapeutics called fusion inhibitors, which may attack resistant HIV strains.
Panacos Pharmaceuticals Inc. ? a Gaithersburg biotechnology company developing antiviral therapeutics ? presented its HIV fusion inhibitor program at the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto this week.
“The program goal is to develop drugs that work differently than current HIV drugs,” said company President Graham Allaway.
The HIV treatments available now are enzyme inhibitors, Allaway said, but his company is working on an oral medicine that prevents the virus from binding to a cell.
“We’ve made progress on targeting one of the first steps in the HIV life cycle,” Allaway said. “When the virus interacts with the cell and fuses the viral membrane and the cell membrane, the HIV virus can then reproduce and spread. But by blocking that fusion, you can stop the infection dead in its tracks.”
Fuzeon is the only current inhibitor approved, but it has to be injected and is expensive to administer, he said.
Panacos identified small-molecule chemical compounds that work as inhibitors and can easily be taken orally.
The company is working to improve the medicinal effects of these small molecules andsaid it hopes to begin testing the drug on humans in the next year.
