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Biotech / Medical : Agouron Pharmaceuticals (AGPH) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Randy Schmid who wrote (2499)	10/26/1997 9:09:00 PM
From: JOHN W.	Respond to of 6136

From current AIDS Treatment News: "Many who were not at the recent ICAAC meeting (the annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Toronto, Ontario, September 28 - October 1) received an erroneous doom-and-gloom impression from the newspapers. Actually, the meeting had both good news and bad -- probably more of the good news, especially indications that there may be more immune recovery after successful antiretroviral treatment than many experts had thought. There was also more information which is likely to help make existing drug treatments work better in the future (for example, on the importance of maintaining adequate trough levels, and of obtaining viral suppression far below the 400 copy limit of the officially approved viral load test). But only one AIDS story got much media attention -- the report from the University of California San Francisco and the Gladstone Institute that -- in a large urban clinic, often with heavily pretreated patients -- antiretroviral combinations including a protease inhibitor were having only about a 50% long-term success, vs. the much higher rates, usually over 80%, in clinical trials. Some readers took away an impression that the drugs do not work, so why bother? The problem was not in the news reports themselves but in the headlines, which in the newspaper business are seldom written by reporters, but by writers who are not familiar with the story and are aiming to attract attention. We spoke afterwards with the presenter, Steven Deeks, M.D. "At least in 1996, many people used protease inhibitors suboptimally, so there was much virological failure. But people should not take from our data the impression that the drugs do not work. I was very impressed at how well they did work, given the limitations. "People should be encouraged to use these drugs in accordance with the current guidelines. But many cannot or will not do this, so for them the drugs may not have a lasting effect. We need to be aggressive in developing better treatments and strategies."