Companies and academic researchers presented a slew of data on anti-infectives at the 39th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco in late September. But in the field of HIV/AIDS, which has in the past put the conference in the media spotlight, there were no breakthroughs.
"There are no huge breakthroughs in HIV anymore," said New York analyst Mike King, who covers a number of companies with HIV/AIDS drugs in development or on the market for BancBoston Robertson Stephens. "The gains are going to come incrementally."
According to King, some of the best data came from Gilead Sciences Inc., of Foster City, Calif., which presented data on tenofovir; Abbott Laboratories, of Abbott Park, Ill., which reported on ABT-378/ritonavir; and Trimeris Inc., of Research Triangle Park, N.C., which released early Phase II data on its T-20 fusion inhibitor.
Although Gilead has long been a darling in the biotech community, the data release oddly drove the stock price down about 10 percent on Sept. 27, when the company also released positive Phase III results on Ambisome (liposomal amphotericin B) for acute cryptococcal meningitis in AIDS patients.
King said the market "misunderstood" the Gilead results, finding the viral load reduction unimpresssive. He noted, however, "you don't get the same whopping reductions as when patients are treatment-naive. When patients have big viral loads, you can get three-log reductions, but what people don't understand is that the Gilead drug was able to suppress the virus and keep it down." King also liked the drug's ability to fight resistant virus.
Gilead plans to move into a Phase III trial in the fourth quarter with tenofovir at the highest dose tested in the Phase II study, 300 milligrams. That dose reduced circulating virus in the bloodstream by more than 80 percent.
Companies looking to make a splash must "be more nimble and address the fastest-growing segment of the market, patients resistant to first-line therapies," he said. That patient group already comprises a majority of the HIV/AIDS population and is rapidly growing, he said. ÂDebbie Strickland