The Good and Bad of AIDS Research

For AIDS patients, doctors, and drug companies, finding effective treatments has been a maddening experience. A major human study in Thailand of an AIDS vaccine looked like a breakthrough in September, only to be discredited later when additional test results showed a less-promising outcome.

The good news from a drug-industry trade group: Almost 100 medicines for AIDS/HIV and related conditions are either being tested in humans or are awaiting U.S. approval.

The bad news: Only one in five drugs tested in people are ultimately approved. Thirty-one medicines to treat HIV/AIDS have been approved since the virus was discovered in the 1980s.

The point of the report by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America is to note that despite years of disappointments, dozens of drug and biotech companies, from the behemoth Pfizer Inc. to closely held Arisyn Therapeutics in Frederick, Maryland, are in advanced stages of developing new treatments.

Among the medicines in development, 23 are vaccines, the report shows. A highly effective vaccine can prevent 70 million infections in 15 years, the group says. Pfizer's Wyeth unit, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Novartis AG, and Sanofi-Aventis SA are the big companies testing vaccines.

More than half of the medicines are antivirals, including several from Gilead Sciences Inc. The other drugs being tested include cancer, immune system, and gene therapies.

There are more than 1 million U.S. AIDS cases reported through 2007, including more than 583,000 deaths. Worldwide, there were 33 million people with HIV that year. And while the rate of new cases is much slower in the U.S. than other parts of the world, there was a 15 percent increase in 34 states that report such statistics between 2004 and 2007.

It takes 10 to 15 years to bring a drug from the lab to the U.S. market. The odds for any drug tested in a laboratory to ultimately be approved are terribly long. Only five in 5,000 tested even make it to human trials. Given that statistic, one in five doesn't seem so bad.