This Drug (Medicine) Has Been Named the 2024 Breakthrough of the Year
HIV drug Lenacapavir has been named the 2024 Breakthrough Drug of the Year by Science magazine.
This newsletter issue is linked to a scientific development that caught my fancy, so I decided to write a newsletter issue on it.
I hope you’ll find it interesting. Don’t proceed if science dreads you. Close this email/article ASAP.
Onto the issue now.
News
Lenacapavir, an innovative injectable drug developed by Gilead Sciences, has recently been recognized as the 2024 Breakthrough of the Year by Science magazine. This recognition underscores its potential to significantly change the landscape of HIV prevention and treatment.
Call it a coincidence if you may, but this news comes a day after I was reading a book column about COVID-19. Isn’t it surprising that a pandemic is enough miles in the past that books have been written on the subject?
I was reading one of those books late one night and went to sleep. The next day, a column appeared in the middle of the newspaper: it was about the Breakthrough Drug of the Year by Science magazine. My curiosity peaked as I was reading about medicine the previous night only.
It was a promised 6-month cure for HIV. A shot with almost 100% accuracy, the words in the newspaper meant. That means two shots a year can cure a disease that affects more than 1,000,000 people each year.
That’s a real breakthrough!
Here’s some more detail about this [directly from the source: Science magazine’s website]:
Despite decades of progress, HIV still infects more than 1 million people a year, and a vaccine remains stubbornly out of reach. But this year the world got a glimpse of what might be the next best thing: an injectable drug that protects people for 6 months with each shot.
A large efficacy trial in African adolescent girls and young women reported in June that these shots reduced HIV infections to zero — an astonishing 100% efficacy. Any doubts about the finding disappeared 3 months later when a similar trial, conducted across four continents, reported 99.9% efficacy in gender diverse people who have sex with men.
Many HIV/AIDS researchers are now hopeful that the drug, lenacapavir, will powerfully drive down global infection rates when used as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). “It has the potential, if we can do it right, which means going big and getting it out there,” says Linda-Gail Bekker, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Cape Town who led one of the two efficacy trials for the drug’s maker, Gilead Sciences.
But that’s not the only reason Science has named lenacapavir its 2024 Breakthrough of the Year. The off-the-charts success of the drug as PrEP sprang from a basic research advance: a new understanding of the structure and function of HIV’s capsid protein, which lenacapavir targets. Many other viruses have their own capsid proteins, which form a shell around their genetic material, so this drug’s triumph raises the exciting prospect that similar capsid inhibitors could fight other viral diseases.
Great strides have been made in HIV treatments since the bad old days, when an infection meant horrific wasting, a decimated immune system leading to other rampant infections, and an early death. In 1996, researchers showed that powerful cocktails of drugs could fully suppress HIV and stave off development of AIDS — Science’s breakthrough that year. Current antiviral drugs are even better, allowing millions to live normal life spans with a chronic but manageable disease. Treated people whose virus is suppressed also rarely infect others, a discovery that led Science to declare “treatment as prevention” the 2011 Breakthrough of the Year. As more people around the world gained access to the drugs, new global infections plummeted from 2.1 million in 2011 to 1.3 million last year.
In my limited readings and research for satiating my curiosity and writing this article, I came across widely optimistic applause this news is getting from scientists and researchers.
Apart from Lenacapavir being hailed as a significant breakthrough in HIV prevention, the success of this drug could pave the way for curing other viral diseases by leveraging the understanding of capsid proteins in various viruses.
In a report published by WHO, they hailed and welcomed this recent development.
WHO welcomes the latest findings from the PURPOSE-2 trial on long-acting injectable lenacapavir (LEN) for HIV prevention. […]
LEN, an HIV-1 capsid inhibitor delivered by subcutaneous injection twice a year, was shown to be highly effective in preventing HIV among cisgender men, transgender men, transgender women, and gender non-binary individuals who have sex with partners assigned male at birth.LEN, an HIV-1 capsid inhibitor delivered by subcutaneous injection twice a year, was shown to be highly effective in preventing HIV among cisgender men, transgender men, transgender women, and gender non-binary individuals who have sex with partners assigned male at birth. […]
The PURPOSE 2 trial reported a 96% reduction in the risk of acquiring HIV among study participants, with 99.9% of individuals using LEN not acquiring HIV. Only two new HIV cases were recorded among 2180 participants receiving LEN twice-yearly, compared to nine new cases among the 1087 participants receiving daily oral TDF/FTC (tenofovir disoproxil fumarate/emtricitabine). Lenacapavir demonstrated a 96% reduction in HIV incidence compared to background HIV incidence (2.37 per 100 person-years) and was 89% more effective than daily oral TDF/FTC in preventing HIV acquisition. Both LEN and daily oral TDF/FTC were well tolerated, with no significant or new safety concerns identified. […]
Together, the results from PURPOSE 1 and PURPOSE 2 provide compelling evidence for the potential of LEN to transform HIV prevention globally, across diverse populations. It is important to note that oral PrEP is safe and effective in preventing HIV when taken as indicated.