Weekly treatment in a single pill

2018/01/09 Agirre Ruiz de Arkaute, Aitziber - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Biokimika

An effective pill is being developed to combat infection with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus once a week. Current retroviral treatments are very effective, but require a mandatory daily intake for their effectiveness. Research has shown that only 30% of patients take it properly, which can cause the virus to develop drug resistance. Faced with this situation, biomedical engineers at the Harvard Medical School try to develop a weekly pill that has already proven its efficacy in pigs.

The pill will be taken verbally. When reaching the stomach, the capsule expands and acquires a star shape. It becomes too big to cross the pylorus and remove it from the stomach, and gradually it frees the inner drug, in the stomach itself. The capsule may contain several medications inside, placed on each arm of the star. In addition, the capsule is designed so that food can continue to pass through the pylorus without disturbing.

The new treatment can help reduce therapeutic failure and can also help in cases of prevention. Anyway, the researchers stressed the need to do even more research. In fact, pigs do not develop HIV infection, so they have only been able to demonstrate the dosage of the drug and not its efficacy against infection. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

 

--> To learn more, read the interview with the virologist Eva Poveda: “People who receive HIV treatment do not contaminate the virus.”