Former world leaders, celebrities and a Nobel prize-winning scientist who helped discover HIV have written to US pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences pleading with it to make an expensive “gamechanger” HIV medicine available to people in poorer countries.
The drug, Lenacapavir, can treat HIV when given as two injections a year. Ongoing trials are expected to show it is also an effective prevention drug, reports The Guardian.
Currently it is available only in a few wealthy countries with a price tag of $42 250 in the US for the first year of treatment, and $39 000 for subsequent years. The company’s patent will not run out for almost two decades.
In the letter, campaigners urged Gilead to “shape history” by avoiding a repeat of the “horror and shame” of the early years of the Aids pandemic, when 12m people died in poorer parts of the world after effective drugs became available but were unaffordable.
The letter writers said the medicine “could be a real gamechanger worldwide for the people most excluded from high-quality healthcare” and “help end Aids as a public health threat by 2030 – but only if all who would benefit from it can access it”.
Three hundred signatories – including the actors Gillian Anderson, Stephen Fry and Sharon Stone; former heads of state; Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the Nobel-winning scientist who helped discover HIV; and HIV sufferers – have signed the letter.
It urges the company to ensure access for people in low and middle-income countries who either have, or are at risk of, HIV, at the same time as the drug becomes available in high-income countries.
This could be achieved by licensing generic versions through the Unitaid-backed Medicines Patent Pool, which the company has done in the past for treatments for HIV/Aids and Hepatitis C, although only for low, rather than middle-income countries.
“The global south is home to most of the people who could benefit from Lenacapavir. Currently, across Asia, Africa and Latin America, around 1m people become infected with HIV every year; imagine if we could prevent all these people from becoming infected, and thereby change their lives, delivering them from a lifetime of treatment and medical care,” said the letter, organised by the People’s Medicines Alliance.
A Gilead statement said: “As we await the results of our pivotal phase 3 clinical trials which start to read out later this year, we are in regular conversations with HIV advocates and partners, including governments and NGOs, as we work to reach our access goals.
“Those conversations have been ongoing over the course of the trials. We are extremely committed to developing an access model that ensures lenacapavir for PrEP reaches as many people as possible who can benefit.
“This means delivering it swiftly, sustainably, and in sufficient volumes in low- and middle-income countries.”
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