This annual shot might protect against HIV infections

You never hear “100 %” in medicine. The successful trial we have ever seen to prevent HIV. The drug was also safe (already approved to treat HIV infections). It should be injected only twice a year to provide full protection.

This week, the results of a small stage experience for OnceLenacAPAVIR was announced at a conference in San Francisco. These early “human” experiences are designed to test drug safety in healthy volunteers. However, the results are incredibly promising: all volunteers are still suffering from the drug in the blood plasma after a year of injection, and at the levels that previous studies will protect them from HIV infection.

I do not usually feel very enthusiastic about the first stage experiences, which usually include a handful of volunteers and usually does not tell us much if the drug is likely to work. But it seems that this experience is different. Together, Lenacapavir experiences can bring us a big step of ending HIV.

First, a quick summary. We have been subjected to preventive drugs (Prep) is effective to HIV since 2012, but this should be taken daily or before the person is exposed to the virus. In 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration agreed to the first long -acting anti -HIV prevention. This medicine, Cabotegravir, needs to be injected every two months.

But researchers are working on medications that provide longer protection. It may be difficult for people to remember eating daily birth control pills when they are sick, not to mention when they are in good health. These medications have a stain connected to them. “People are concerned about people who hear birth control pills in their bag on the bus … or sees them at a medicine table or bed next to the bed,” says Motali Das, Vice President of HIV and Virus, and the development of HIV in science in the science of Gilead Sciences.