LONDON (Reuters) – Gay men at high risk of HIV who took a daily dose of a Gilead AIDS drug as a preventative measure cut their risk of infection by 86 percent, according to results of a British trial released on Tuesday.
Researchers who conducted the trial of so-called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) said the results offer real hope of reversing the HIV epidemic among men who have sex with men, one of the highest risk groups.
“These results are extremely exciting and show PrEP is highly effective at preventing HIV infection in the real world,” said Sheena McCormack, a professor of clinical epidemiology at University College London and the study’s lead investigator.
PrEP involves people who do not have HIV but who are at high risk of becoming infected seeking to protect themselves by taking a single pill, usually a combination of two antiretrovirals, every day.
The drug used in this trial — Gilead’s anti-retroviral medicine Truvada — was known to reduce new HIV infections in placebo-controlled trials, but researchers wanted to see if similar success could be achieved in a “real world” context.
Some 545 men were enrolled at 13 sexual health clinics across England and randomized to receive PrEP immediately or after a period of 12 months, allowing researchers to compare those on PrEP versus those not yet on PrEP.
The results, presented on Tuesday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle in the United States, showed there were 22 HIV infections among participants in the first year — three in the immediate group and 19 in the deferred group.
The researchers said the 86 percent protection from daily Truvada PrEP is the highest reported from a randomized controlled trial of PrEP to date.
Some 35.3 million people worldwide have HIV. The rising number of patients reflects great strides in recent years in developing sophisticated HIV tests and combination AIDS drugs and getting them to many of those who need them to stay alive.
AIDS experts have estimated that globally, new HIV infections among gay men could by reduced by 20 to 25 percent through PrEP — averting up to a million new infections in this group over 10 years.
(Editing by Catherine Evans)