Once a day AIDS drug approved

Hey now this is pretty cool. Atripla is a once-a-day AIDS, 2-in-1 cocktail of Sustiva and Truvada. The hope is that this formulation will help increase patient compliance, which any medical provider will tell you is one of the biggest problems when it comes to achieving positive therapeutic outcomes.

"We know that an HIV-AIDS patient needs to take 95 percent of his or her pills or they won't work," said John C. Martin, chief executive of Gilead Sciences Inc., one of the companies in the Atripla project. "So the fewer pills a patient needs to take, the better the outcome."

Even I'm terrible at compliance, and I understand this better than most. I'd love to see some graphs that show the correlation between the number of times per day that a drug is taken vs compliance over time. I bet you see much higher compliance rates for a once-a-day drug than you do with twice-a-day regimens, and an even steeper drop-off when you've got someone who needs to take something 3 and 4 times a day. I bet it's particularly bad with 4 times a day dosing, because then you're not necessarily tying a dose to a specific daily activity (eating).

Hrm.

[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, Atripla, HIV, AIDS, Sustiva, truvada, patient compliance[/tags]