Majority of Patients Will Be Able to Use Intelence
Intelence (etravirine) is likely to work well in the vast majority of people who’ve had treatment failures from Sustiva (efavirenz) and Viramune (nevirapine), according to a research letter published in the May 11 issue of AIDS.
Intelence is an antiretroviral (ARV) treatment from the class of drugs known as non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs). It was recently approved for use in people who have resistance to multiple other ARV treatments. Intelence causes HIV to evolve a fairly different pattern of drug-resistance mutations than the other approved NNRTIs, and is likely to work even after people have developed resistance to these older options. There are, however, specific mutations common to all of the NNRTIs, and some people with resistance from previous NNRTI use do not respond to Intelence.
In order to determine what proportion of their NNRTI-experienced clinic patients would likely respond to Intelence, a group of scientists from the St. Stephens Centre at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London examined the genotypic resistance test results from 743 study subjects.
The authors found that 90 percent of the 352 patients who had been on a regimen containing Sustiva would likely respond well to a regimen containing Intelence. Of 391 people who’d been on a regimen containing Viramune, 88 percent would likely respond to Intelence.
Though these results will have to be compared to other real-world cohorts of people living with HIV, they are still quite promising for people who will ultimately need a drug like Intelence in order to build a potent new ARV regimen.
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Beth Benne, RN, is HIV negative, but
the virus has impacted her life. She currently supervises a biannual HIV/AIDS awareness week as
the director of the student health center at Pierce College, a
community commuter school in Woodland Hills, California.
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Overheard in the Women's Forum
"I recently met a guy who is negative. I did tell him about my status and he decided to kiss me anyway (we didn't go further than that). But a day later, he called and said that he actually had a mouth ulcer that time when we kissed and he was very worried. Asked if he can get the virus from me that way. For that moment, I felt so insulted and yet I felt so bad. It was my first time having a contact with a "negative" guy."
