March 6, 2001 CHICAGO (AP) - New research shows that an alternative AIDS cocktail can suppress the disease just as well as more common multi-drug combinations, offering a potential option to patients who've become resistant to standard therapy.
The study compared results in patients treated with a standard AIDS cocktail containing a protease inhibitor to those treated with a combination of three medicines known as nucleoside analogs. The drugs target different enzymes necessary for the AIDS virus to reproduce.
The research was funded by Glaxo Wellcome Inc., maker of the nucleoside analog Ziagen, known generically as abacavir and approved in December 1998.
The study found that patients treated with a nucleoside cocktail containing Ziagen fared as well as those treated with a combination of two nucleosides plus a protease inhibitor. After 48 weeks, 51 percent of patients in both treatment groups achieved the standard measure of having 400 or fewer copies of HIV per milliliter of blood.
However, many AIDS experts favor achieving viral suppression of under 50 copies per milliliter, and by this measure the Ziagen cocktail proved inferior, said Dr. Jeffrey Laurence of Cornell University, senior scientific consultant for the American Foundation for AIDS Research.
Laurence, who was not involved in the study, also noted that it only compared results in patients who had not previously taken anti-viral drugs, so it's unclear whether the same benefits would occur in others.
Still, he called the study "a reasonable piece of information, something to think about if you're concerned about inducing resistance to protease inhibitors and want to keep something in reserve."
The study of 562 HIV-infected patients is published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. Lead author Dr. Schlomo Staszewski of Klinikum der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt, Germany, collaborated with researchers at 73 centers in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe.
Patients took either cocktails containing the nucleoside analogs AZT and 3TC plus Ziagen or Merck & Co.'s protease inhibitor Crixivan, known generically as indinavir.
Ziagen is sold with a warning that in rare cases, it can cause severe and sometimes fatal allergic reactions. In the study, one patient died from an allergic reaction to Ziagen but otherwise side effects were comparable in both groups.
The authors said the risk for allergic reactions and lack of data on long-term effects of Ziagen cocktails should be considered when weighing treatment options.
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
