Medicine moves fast. Here are my top 5 picks for the biggest breakthroughs in June.
1. An extremely effective twice-yearly HIV preventative was approved
New cases of HIV have dropped substantially since the peak in the 1990s, but there are still more than 1 million new infections every year. Pre-exposure prophylaxis pills – if taken every day – are very effective, but side-effects (gastrointestinal), stigma, and having to remember to take it limit adherence in the real world.
This means we’d benefit from a long-acting HIV preventative, which is what Lenacapavir provides. It’s an anti-retroviral, given as an injection every 6 months. Its mode-of-action is capsid inhibition – it blocks three independent parts of the HIV machinery at once. This means it stops HIV from establishing infection.
There’ve been two large phase 3 trials so far (which have spanned 9 countries, including the US, in South Africa, and Brazil): its efficacy was 100% in the first and 99.9% in the second – and it just got approved for the first time (by the FDA).
Here are those results (from the first trial) – one of the most striking figures I’ve ever seen:
