** FILE ** In this May 22, 2008 file photo, the company logo is seen on the doors of a building at Merck & Co. headquarters in Whitehouse Station, N.J. Drugmaker Merck & Co. on Tuesday, July 21, 2009, posted a 12 percent drop in second-quarter profit, due to lower sales of its cholesterol drugs and several vaccines, but still beat Wall Street's conservative expectations.(AP Photo/Mel Evans, file)
Researchers are currently calling an implant as a “Game Changer” as it may provide protection for HIV for people who do not have the virus.
The said implant could possibly protect people from sustaining HIV.
The new implant has been successful in rodents and monkeys and has been implanted in 12 human volunteers.
Researchers say that the implant can be a “game-changer”.
If the implant, which carries Islatravir, a new HIV-abating drug made by Merck, becomes successful, it can become the equivalent to stop using birth control pills and switch to a long-lasting implant that can stop you from becoming pregnant.
The new implant is for those people who do not have HIV, it will be implanted into them, this will stop people from taking their daily pill that will lower the risk of infection.
If the implant becomes successful, people will only have to get a new implant annually.
Merck, the company that is making the implants, did not reveal any price of the new tech/medicine.
They said that further research is needed to prove that the implant will work in humans.
A decade ago, researchers found and created a drug that is needed to be taken daily. The drug can lower the risk of contracting the virus by 99 percent.
The drug, PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) was made as an answer to control HIV and stop it from spreading. But the potential of the drug was not really realized by many.
And this was due to its price, Gilead, which holds the patent on the brand-name version Truvada, is currently priced at 20 thousand USD.
Some have got access to the drug, but many people in the US and Africa do not have access to it as it is extremely expensive.
Another factor about why its potential was limited is because of complacency.
But the new implant created by Merck wants to resolve the problem, and replace the drug with a new implant that only needs to be implanted annually.
In a research that was presented by Merck at the International AIDS Society conference in Mexico City, they said that just a fifth of islatravir (MK-8591) is enough to achieve the same effects of PrEP.
A lower dose in medicine means that there will be lesser side effects too.
The Islatravir is just one of the new drugs that are being made that are called as NRTTIs (nucleoside reverse transcriptase translocation inhibitors).
NRTTIs suppress enzymes that allow the HIV virus to multiply and spread.
Anton Pozniak, the President of the International AIDS Society and the Chair of the IAS 2019 International Scientific, said, “An implant offers another choice for those who might in the future also have pills and injectables available. It could also offer a promising solution to those who face challenges adhering to a daily PrEP regimen. Taken together, the HIV prevention studies presented at IAS 2019 show that we are creating new tools to address the realities of people’s lives.”