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NanoViricides's HIV Drug Found Effective in Animal Studies

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 June 2008, 09:01 CDT

NanoViricides has said that its lead anti-HIV drug candidate demonstrated markedly superior survival results in the test animals when compared to those animals given the anti-HIV 'combo cocktail' in a double-blind animal study.

The company reported that the best nanoviricide anti-HIV drug candidate improved total hours of survival time by 99% with respect to appropriate controls. In contrast, the combo therapy improved survival hours by only 52%. Furthermore, AZT, the first drug used in humans to treat HIV/AIDS, failed to show any survival improvement, as was expected, in this lethality-based animal model study.

The company also reported that the average body weight loss, a measure of the degree of illness in the experimental subjects, was only 11.4% after treatment with this nanoviricide drug candidate, as compared to 12.9% in those treated with the combo cocktail, and to 23% average body weight loss seen in the untreated control mice.

The three-drug combo 'cocktail' used for comparison is one of the most frequently used triple combination therapies in humans. The company is now designing additional studies with the objective of filing an investigational new drug application to the FDA in the future.

Eugene Seymour, CEO of NanoViricides, said: "If these results can be duplicated in humans, triple combo therapy with its toxic side effects may well be replaced in the near future with a much safer single HivCide-I nanoviricide therapy."

Source: Datamonitor

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