A New Zealand company said Thursday that United States authorities had approved extended trials of a new drug it claims ”gobbles up” the Aids virus.
Virionyx Corporation Ltd of Auckland said its HRG214 drug had successfully completed initial trials involving 18 volunteers with HIV/Aids at the Harvard Medical School in the US.
The United States Food and Drug Administration has now approved the second stage of trials at Harvard, during which 48 HIV/Aids patients will be given twice weekly injections of the drug, which is based on goat plasma.
A director of the company, Colin Harvey, told Radio New Zealand the first phase trials had proved the drug was safe and showed early evidence of anti-viral activity.
”It’s an antibody that we manufacture in goats here in New Zealand, which makes it a unique bio-tech product, and the antibody actually literally gobbles up the Aids virus and cells infected with the Aids virus,” he said.
But Harvey warned the company still faced several big hurdles in the approval process and it was not likely to go into production until 2005.
Virionyx announced it was expanding its laboratories to facilitate further development, and eventually production, of the drug.
Dr Bruce Dezube, an Aids and cancer specialist who supervised the initial trials at Harvard, will present the results at an international conference on Aids in Barcelona next week. – Sapa-DPA