Collaboration between UW School of Pharmacy and UW Medicine leads to promising breakthrough to ease daily regimen
An interdisciplinary team led by Professors Rodney JY Ho of the UW School of Pharmacy and Ann Collier of the UW School of Medicine has been working to develop a long-lasting (7-day) therapy for HIV and are already making advances into long-term therapies to suppress the HIV virus.
In the March issue of the journal AIDS, the UW’s Targeted Long-Acting Combination Antiretroviral Therapy (TLC-ART) team reported that a dose that combines three HIV drugs—intended to overcome drug insufficiency in lymph nodes—lasted over two weeks in a macaque model, a remarkable breakthrough.
Currently HIV patients take multiple pills daily, which can create challenges for some HIV-positive people. Details of the study were published in the March 2017 issue of AIDS, one of the most respected HIV/AIDS journals. John Kraft, Lisa McConnachie, Josefin Koehn, Loren Kinman, Carol Collins, Danny Shen, Ann Collier and Rodney Ho lead the research team. The article is entitled, “Long-acting combination anti-HIV drug suspension enhances and sustains higher drug levels in lymph node cells than in blood cells and plasma.”
The two co-Principal Investigators and the TLC-ART team are developing innovative treatments to overcome limitations of current oral drug therapies. The UW’s Targeted Long-Acting Combination Antiretroviral Therapy (TLC-ART) Program led by is an innovative, translational medicine research designed to leverage existing knowledge and a world-class interdisciplinary team of academic, NIH, and industry researchers to deliver new, safe, stable, scalable, and tolerable antiretroviral combination treatments for HIV infection.
The Program has multiple projects designed to interact in a coordinated and collaborative way with the focused goal of producing injectable drug combinations that will achieve effective drug levels lasting more than seven days.
This study is sponsored by NIH Grant UM1 AI120176.
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