New Rx may wipe out HIV - top doc
BY JORDAN LITEDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, May 16th 2007, 4:00 AM
The government's top AIDS scientist says patients with low levels of HIV in their blood could be cured of the fatal disease with mega-doses of new drugs.
The medications - Roche's Fuzeon and Merck's Isentress, which is still in development - could make HIV disappear in patients who have already limited the virus using existing drugs, Dr. Anthony Fauci told Bloomberg News.
"We now have a scientific basis to feel that it's at least worth pursuing it in some select patients," said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
But New York AIDS specialists said talk of a cure was "very premature and very speculative," though patients have already begun calling to ask if they could one day quit taking their medicines.
"It's still experimental and with our current therapy, not an option," said Dr. Antonio Urbina, medical director of HIV/AIDS education and training at St. Vincent's Comprehensive HIV Center.
In a study published Monday in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Fauci estimated that HIV could be nearly eliminated from patients' blood after eight years of treatment using current three-drug combinations. Then doctors could try to cure the disease through aggressive treatment with the new drugs, Fauci said.
But the chances of wiping out all HIV in the body are slim, even by adding drugs that attack the virus in new ways, said Dr. Rowena Johnston, vice president of research at the American Foundation for AIDS Research.
"It has been tried before, and it's true they want to try it in a greater number of patients and with new drugs," she said. "Something different will happen and it might be that the virus left over is of a different type, but there's going to be some virus they're not going to get."
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