| Title | New Strawberry-Flavored H.I.V. Drugs for Babies Are Offered at $1 a Day | |
| Date | Monday December 02 2019, @06:03PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the can't-adults-have-nice-flavours-too? dept. | ||
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
New Strawberry-Flavored H.I.V. Drugs for Babies Are Offered at $1 a Day
About 80,000 babies and toddlers die of AIDS each year, mostly in Africa, in part because their medicines come in hard pills or bitter syrups that are very difficult for small children to swallow or keep down.
But on Friday, the Indian generic drug manufacturer Cipla announced a new, more palatable pediatric formulation. The new drug, called Quadrimune, comes in strawberry-flavored granules the size of grains of sugar that can be mixed with milk or sprinkled on baby cereal. Experts said it could save the lives of thousands of children each year.
"This is excellent news for all children living with H.I.V.," said Winnie Byanyima, the new executive director of UNAIDS, the United Nations agency in charge of the fight against the disease. "We have been eagerly waiting for child-friendly medicines that are easy to use and good to taste."
Cipla revolutionized the provision of AIDS drugs for adults almost two decades ago, pricing them at $1 a day. The new pediatric formulation will likewise be priced at $1 a day. The announcement by Cipla and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, an offshoot of Doctors Without Borders that supported the development of the drug, was timed to coincide with World AIDS Day, which [
iswas] Sunday.
Despite big advances in the prevention of mother-child transmission of H.I.V., about 160,000 children are still born infected each year, according to UNAIDS, mostly in the poorest towns and villages of Africa. Almost half of them die before the age of 2, usually because they have no access to drugs or cannot tolerate them.
Quadrimune is still under review by the Food and Drug Administration, and F.D.A. approval almost inevitably leads to rapid certification by the World Health Organization. The company hopes to get a decision by May.
Trials in healthy adults showed that the new formulation gets the drugs into the blood; the four drugs in it were approved in the 1990s and are used in many combinations.
A clinical trial in H.I.V.-infected infants, run by Epicentre, the research arm of Doctors Without Borders, is now underway in Uganda to prove to African health ministries that children accept the new formulation. Most of the research costs have been paid by UNITAID, a Geneva-based organization set up by France, Norway, Brazil and some other countries which imposed special taxes on airline flights that are dedicated to bettering global health.
[...] The $1 a day price is for Quadrimune doses appropriate for children of between 20 and 30 pounds, he noted, so the cost for newborns would be even lower.
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