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 - Tuesday, November 2, 1999
The New York-based drug maker said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved a new 200-milligram Videx tablet, meant to simplify drug-taking regimens of patients infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Two of the Videx tablets would need to be taken once a day in combination with other drugs that also help prevent reproduction of HIV. Patients currently using Videx must take two 100 milligram tablets twice a day.
Videx, also known as ddI or by its formal chemical name didanosine, is a member of a class of anti-HIV drugs that block an enzyme known as reverse transcriptase that the virus uses to reproduce. Specifically, it is a nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI).
Videx is used in a multi-drug cocktail that typically also includes another reverse transcriptase inhibitor and a "protease inhibitor," a separate class of drug that works by blocking the protease enzyme also used by the virus to reproduce.
Videx had global third-quarter 1999 sales of $49 million. Another Bristol-Myers reverse transcriptase inhibitor, Zerit, had sales of $155 million in the quarter.
Company research chief Peter Ringrose told Reuters in May that Bristol-Myers was testing a once-a-day form of Zerit as well as a new experimental protease inhibitor, BMY-232632, that had the potential of becoming a once-a-day drug if it is eventually approved by U.S. regulators.
Ringrose said at the time that BMY-232632, if approved, might be combined with future once-a-day versions of Zerit and Videx, with the aim of greatly reducing the number of pills that patients must take.
He said that with a cocktail of once-a-day forms of Videx, Zerit and the new protease inhibitor, patients would only have to take a handful of tablets a day versus up to 30 pills a day now required in some cocktail regimens.
"The whole idea of once-daily dosing is to simplify treatment for patients so they comply with their drug-taking regimens," Mark Short, a Bristol-Myers spokesman, said Tuesday.
He noted that many AIDS patients abandon their anti-HIV drug cocktails every year because of the difficulty of keeping track of so many pills, and taking them -- thereby allowing the virus to develop resistance to the therapies.
Shares of Bristol Myers were off 3/4 at 76-3/8 in mid-morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
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