Long-Term Efficacy With Agouron's Viracept

Triple drug therapy with Agouron Pharmaceuticals' protease inhibitorViracept (nelfinavir mesylate) plus Glaxo Wellcome's Epivir (lamivudine) and Retrovir (zidovudine) has been shown to suppress viral load below the limits of detection for more than one year, according to new data presented at the 37th Interscience Conference of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Toronto, Canada.

A total of 297 antiretroviral-naive patients with a viral load of more than 15,000 copies/mL were enrolled in the trial. Eight weeks following treatment initiation with either nelfinavir (500mg or 750mg tid) plus lamivudine and zidovudine, or lamivudine and zidovudine alone, 80% of patients exhibited a response.

At six months, a mean viral load of 2.79 log10 was recorded using an ultrasensitive assay (a drop of 2.0 log10 was seen using the Roche Amplicor assay). The study demonstrated that patients in the high-dose nelfinavir arm (750mg tid) benefited more than patients in the other two arms; after one year, over 80% of patients in the high-dose group still had a viral load of less than 500 copies/mL.