There wasn't much suspense surrounding this meeting. The FDA advisory committee voted unanimously that Isentress, a novel type of HIV med, should be approved for AIDS patients who fail to respond to other treatments. The panel also recommended accelerated approval for the pill to be used in combination with other HIV med.
Panel members were continuing to discuss the recommended label and the appropriate patient population for the drug, given certain risks that include an increased incidence of cancer in treated patients, Reuters reports.
"There's no doubt this is a great drug," says panel member Peter Havens, a professor of pediatrics at Medical College of Wisconsin, Bloomberg News reports. "It is very useful for patients who have experienced a lot of failure."
Isentress is designed to target one of three enzymes HIV needs to reproduce. Current drugs on the market attack the other two enzymes, reverse transcriptase and protease. If approved, Isentress would be the only drug to target the third enzyme, known as integrase, Bloomberg notes.
Last month, the FDA approved another type of HIV drug, Pfizer's Selzentry, which can be used in certain types of HIV patients, but the drug inhibits one of the two routes HIV uses to infect cells, and doesn't treat HIV specifically.