In response to new economic and regulatory realities, CytoDyn, Inc has made a sea change in its strategy for developing Cytolin, the company's unique immune therapy for treating HIV/AIDS. Studies of the drug will be designed and conducted by Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the premier teaching hospitals in Boston, Massachusetts, as part of its mission to advance medical knowledge and treatments through research, education and patient care.
During the past decade, significant improvements in the antiviral 'cocktails' used to treat HIV/AIDS have transformed this once fatal disease into a chronic, manageable condition. Many such antiviral drugs are available, including Atripla, which combines drugs from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Gilead Sciences; Viracept from Pfizer; and Norvir from Abbott Laboratories, to name but a few. These drugs are the ingredients of Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART), which has saved countless lives and is well tolerated by most patients, although all drugs have side effects.
The current standard of treatment recommends withholding antiviral drugs until the disease has progressed to the point where the drugs are required to maintain a patient's health, typically a period of about five years from initial infection. A chief reason for withholding treatment during the early years of HIV infection is that antiviral drugs attack the virus directly. As a result, natural selection promotes the evolution of HIV into species that are resistant to those drugs. If antiviral drugs were prescribed too early, then the virus might become resistant to those drugs, rendering them ineffective, by the time they were necessary to maintain a patient's health.
Cytolin is a monoclonal antibody administered by intravenous infusion and might expand the standard of treatment.