Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia - Monday July 12, 1999
The drugs, known as fusion inhibitors, are the mainstay of Durham, North Carolina-based Trimeris Inc., which hopes they will open up a new front in the war against AIDS.
The drugs, known by their experimental names T-20 and T-1249, stop the HIV virus from attaching to a cell. If the virus cannot latch onto a cell, it cannot infect it.
One drawback with these drugs is that they cannot be taken orally, like other HIV drugs, but must be injected. Nonetheless, AIDS experts say they have promise.
Under the agreements, Roche will market the compounds worldwide.
In the United States and Canada, Roche and Trimeris will share development expenses and profits for the two compounds, while Roche will bear development costs outside the United States and Canada and pay Trimeris royalties on net sales.
Roche will make an initial cash payment to Trimeris of $10 million and up to $78 million more in cash and funding as the company reaches various "milestones" in development, approval and marketing of the drugs.
Because HIV patients have to stay on complex cocktails of drugs for years, they often develop drug resistances. After a while some patients run out of options so it is important to have new drugs that attack the virus in different ways.
"When you consider that as many as 40 percent of people infected with HIV are currently on their third or fourth set of HIV combination treatments because of treatment failures or cross-resistance between drugs, the huge demand for a completely new approach to fighting HIV is clear," Roche Chief Executive Franz Humer said in the statement.
"The antiviral activity of fusion inhibitors appears to be as promising as protease inhibitors did at a similar stage of their development," said Dr. Michael Saag, director of the AIDS Outpatient Clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who has led tests on the drugs.
"The major difference is that T-20 is effective even against (HIV virus strains) that are resistant to protease inhibitors and reverse transcriptase inhibitors," Saag said.
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