HIV prevention medication ‘could one day be a yearly jab'
An annual jab to protect against HIV 'shows potential', according to an early study.
Millions of people around the world are deemed to be at high risk of contracting the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
But only 3.5 million take pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which reduces a person's risk of getting HIV.
Researchers believe that giving people the option for long-lasting treatment could help reduce the number of new HIV infections, citing potential problems with 'adherence and persistence' among people taking daily tablets.
The new study, published in The Lancet, found that a yearly injection lenacapavir, made by Gilead Sciences, was 'safe and well tolerated'.
The study, which has also been presented to the 2025 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, was a phase one clinical trial examining data on 40 people aged 18 to 55, who were given a single dose of the treatment.
Concentrations of the annual medication remain in the body for at least 56 weeks, researchers found.
They said that average concentrations 'exceeded those associated with efficacy' in the trial which assessed the jab at a twice-yearly interval.
'These data show the potential for biomedical HIV prevention with a once-yearly dosing interval,' experts wrote in The Lancet.
More studies will be needed to confirm the efficacy of the treatment, they added.
'There were 1.3 million new HIV infections globally in 2023,' the authors wrote.
'However, despite the availability of multiple pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) options, only 3.5 million of the 21.2 million people who would benefit from PrEP were receiving it in 2023.
'Although daily oral PrEP options are highly effective when used as directed, challenges with adherence and persistence have limited their overall effect.
'Longer-acting options can overcome some of the key challenges with daily oral PrEP by avoiding the requirement for adherence to daily dosing.'
They added: 'Yearly dosing of lenacapavir has the potential to further decrease current barriers to PrEP by increasing the uptake of, persistence on, and, therefore, scalability of PrEP.'
A long-acting injectable PrEP has been approved in the US, but it is not yet available in the UK.
Experts at the National Institute for health and Care Excellence (Nice) are currently considering whether or not to approve a PrEP injection which is given once every two months.
Commenting on the new study, Richard Angell, chief executive of Terrence Higgins Trust, said: 'PrEP as a daily pill has been a game-changer in our HIV response, the prospect of 'safe' annual injectable PrEP is as exciting as it is transformational.
'It's great to see these early results that suggest injectable PrEP might be effective for up to 12 months, we need to get ready for its roll out now and fund sexual health clinics to do so.
'PrEP has been characterised by delays — and in turn, inequalities — and this cannot continue.
'The oral pill is still not available in prisons, online or in community pharmacy.
'The Scottish Medicines Consortium has finally approved two monthly PrEP injections for use in Scotland, but we are waiting for Nice approval for use in England.
'Thanks to rapid HIV testing, PrEP and the fact that a person living with HIV on effective treatment can't pass it on, we can end new HIV cases by 2030—all without a vaccine or a cure. Increasing access to PrEP—including making oral PrEP accessible beyond sexual health services through a digital service and community pharmacies and getting injectables to be routinely commissioned—will be crucial to realising this historic goal.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
14 hours ago
- Reuters
Goal to end AIDS by 2030 'more off-track' after Trump cuts, UNAIDS head says
JOHANNESBURG, June 13 (Reuters) - Donald Trump's cuts to HIV/AIDS programmes will further derail an already faltering plan to end the disease as a public health threat by 2030, UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima said on Friday. With 1.3 million new infections in 2023, according to the latest data, the world was already "off track," Byanyima told journalists in South Africa, a country with the world's largest number of people living with HIV, at 8 million. "Less funding means we will get more and more off-track," she said in the main city of Johannesburg, after meeting President Cyril Ramaphosa to discuss Africa's HIV/AIDS strategy in light of the U.S. president slashing billions of dollars in foreign aid in February. "We don't know yet what that impact will be, but impact there will be: ... already you see in several countries a drop in the number of people going to clinics," Byanyima said. Before the cuts, prevention programmes had brought down new infections, she said, but they were "not coming down fast enough to reach our target of 2023." Now, with the shuttering of community prevention clinics across Africa, infections would surely rise, though it wasn't clear yet by how much, she said. The administration's decision to axe swaths of U.S. foreign aid has disrupted the supply of life-saving HIV treatments, with some countries facing potentially running out. In South Africa, about a fifth of whose HIV budget was U.S.-funded, testing and monitoring of HIV patients is already falling. Byanyima said even poor, indebted countries were managing to plug funding gaps, but called on other rich nations to step in. "We're saying to the donors: this is one of the diseases ... without a cure, without a vaccine, yet we're seeing progress," she said. "If you've got a good success story, why drop it ... before you end it?"
Reuters
16 hours ago
- Reuters
Health Rounds: Air pollution exposure alters fetal brain development
June 13 (Reuters) - (This is an excerpt of the Health Rounds newsletter, where we present latest medical studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox for free sign up here.) Brain development in the womb is affected by the mother's level of exposure to air pollution, researchers have found, although it's not clear whether the brain structure differences observed will cause any issues later. Researchers in Barcelona analyzed data collected between 2018 and 2021 from 754 mother-fetus pairs. During the third trimester of pregnancy, participants underwent transvaginal neurosonography, a specialized ultrasound that allows the analysis of fetal brain shape and structures. Higher prenatal exposure to nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and black carbon in pregnant women's homes, workplaces, and commuting routes was associated with an increase in the volumes of multiple brain regions that contain cerebrospinal fluid, the researchers reported in The Lancet Planetary Health, opens new tab. Higher exposure to black carbon was also linked with a reduction in the depth of a groove in the brain called the lateral sulcus, which the researchers said might suggest less maturation of the brain. All measurements of brain structures were within the range considered normal, however. 'At this stage, we can only report having observed differences in the brains of fetuses with higher exposure to pollution compared to those with lower exposure,' senior study author Jordi Sunyer of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health said in a statement. 'Additional research is needed to determine whether these effects are reversible after birth or if they persist, and whether they have any implications for neurodevelopmental outcomes in later stages.' Scientists have been wrong about how acetaminophen eases pain, a discovery that could lead to new pain management approaches, researchers reported in PNAS, opens new tab. For decades, scientists believed that acetaminophen, the main ingredient in Tylenol - known in some countries as paracetamol - relieved pain by working only in the brain and spinal cord. But researchers have discovered the drug also works outside the brain, in the nerves that first detect pain. After the drug is ingested, the body processes it into a metabolite called AM404. The new study found in laboratory experiments that AM404 is produced in pain-sensing nerve endings, where it shuts off specific channels that help transmit pain signals to the brain. By blocking these sodium channels, AM404 stops the pain message before it even starts, the researchers said. 'This is the first time we've shown that AM404 works directly on the nerves outside the brain,' study leader Alexander Binshtok of Hebrew University in Israel said in a statement. 'It changes our entire understanding of how paracetamol fights pain.' The discovery could lead to new types of painkillers that mimic the effects of AM404, the researchers suggested. Because AM404 targets only the nerves that carry pain, such drugs may avoid some of the side effects of traditional painkillers, they said. U.S. appendix cancer rates, while still low, have been climbing dramatically in younger adults, according to a report published in Annals of Internal Medicine, opens new tab. Appendix cancer rates were three times higher among people born between 1975 and 1985, and four times higher among those born between 1981 and 1989, than among people born in the 1940s, based on national U.S. population data. The conclusions are drawn from the nearly 4,900 adults who were diagnosed with appendix cancer in the United States between 1975 and 2019. The pattern of increasing cancer rates held true, to varying degrees, for all tumor types, including nonmucinous, mucinous, goblet cell, or signet ring cell carcinoma, the researchers said. Rates of colon cancers and other gastrointestinal malignancies have also been rising in younger adults, for reasons that remain unclear, the researchers noted. 'It really struck our curiosity... Would we observe similar patterns in rare appendiceal cancers?" said study leader Dr. Andreana Holowatyj of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. "And certainly the answer was yes,' 'The big question remains as to why is this happening,' she added. 'But what's most important is that as these higher-risk birth cohorts continue to age, it's likely these rates will continue to increase.' (To receive the full newsletter in your inbox for free sign up here)
Telegraph
21 hours ago
- Telegraph
NHS patients to receive drug that destroys cancer from inside
A so-called 'Trojan Horse' drug that destroys blood cancer from within is set to be rolled out to thousands of NHS patients. The health service will be the first in the world to make the drug available to patients with multiple myeloma – an incurable cancer of the bone marrow. The drug, called belantamab mafadotin, was developed in the UK and has been dubbed a 'Trojan Horse' therapy because it tricks cancer cells into absorbing it before killing them from within. While the cancer is incurable, treatment is designed to extend people's lives by as much as possible while minimising the impact of side effects and on quality of life. In trials, cancer progression was delayed by three years on average in those taking the drug, which was three times longer than the most common treatment. Around 1,500 patients a year in England will benefit after the treatment was approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence on Thursday. The drug will be offered to patients whose cancer has progressed or not responded to the first choice of treatment using another drug, lenalidomide. Patients who are prescribed the drug will receive it via an infusion once every three weeks in combination with two other cancer treatments.
