China Starts to Test New Anti-HIV Drug

China starts to test new anti-HIV drug

BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) — A chemical compound extracted from a Chinese herb efficacious for treating both HIV and hepatitis B is being tested on humans, said Chinese scientists.

Extracted from Inula britannic, the compound, 1, 5-di-O- caffeoylquinic acid (1,5-DCQA), has proved to be able to work on HIV or HBV (hepatitis B virus) in a way different from current medicines, said Dong Junxing, a leading scientist with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences.

“If clinical experiments back up initial findings, the compound will be an irreversible HIV and HBV integrase inhibitor, which provides a new alternative for AIDS and hepatitis B treatment,” Dong was quoted as saying by Thursday’s China Daily.

Dong and his team started research in 1993 with filtering effective anti-HBV constituents from more than 100 kinds of Chinese herbs. Two years later, they began to experiment on ducks and monkeys.

The research team has begun a six-month clinical research on about 200 healthy volunteers. “If it goes smoothly, a new medicine will be on the market in two years,” he said.

“We will try a combined prescription of the new drug and current medicines to see whether it can have better efficacy,” he said.

The price of the new drug may be much lower than any other one now available, Dong said, because they can synthesize the constituent chemically instead of extracting it from herbs, according to the newspaper.