A reformulated implant of investigational HIV prevention drug islatravir could protect people from HIV for a year.
Or at least results from a small, early trial suggest that's a possibility.
"It's a very exciting time for [preexposure prophylaxis]," Randolph Matthews, MD, PhD, a senior scientist at Merck, who presented the implant data, told Medscape Medical News. "It's an option that we foresee for individuals who might be having difficulty with the daily pill, whether that's because of forgetting [to take it] or for whom it's difficult to get the pill, or there's some stigma about having the pill around the house."
Still, this trial was preliminary and small ― it included only 36 participants. Matthews told Medscape Medical News that he "hopes it will be available" in less than 5 years, but that depends on how the clinical trials go.
Right now, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved only generic tenofovir disoproxil fumarate/emtracitabine (Truvada) and its cousin, tenofovir alafenamide/emtracitabine (Descovy), for HIV prevention, and only Truvada has been approved for treatment of cisgender women.
But that looks to be changing, and rapidly, not just because of the data presented on the islatravir implant but also because of data presented on a monthly
