Boehringer Ingleheim's Viramune achieves durable patient benefit in HIV trial

Long-term data from the NEFA (Nevirapine/Efavirenz/Abacavir) study indicates, according to German pharmaceutical firm Boehringer Ingleheim, that HIV-infected patients who switch from a protease inhibitor-based treatment regimen to a program of reverse-transcriptase inhibition that includes its product Viramune (nevirapine), experience a comparable level of therapeutic benefit.

The company added that patients treated with multi-drug therapy that incorporated Viramune were more likely to maintain virologic suppression after three years than those who moved to an abacavir-based therapeutic regimen. The findings are published in the current edition of the journal AIDS.

The NEFA program, which was the largest prospective protease inhibitor switch study conducted to date, was a randomized multicenter, open-label clinical trial that enrolled 460 HIV positive adults who have previously been treated with at least one protease inhibitor plus two nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. Originally scheduled to include a one-year follow-up period, the study was extended for a three-year period following a recommendation from the European Medicines Agency's (EMEA) Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP).