New Treatment Option Available for HIV Patients!

HIV patients have a new treatment option in the first member of a new class of oral HIV medicines in 10- years. Selzentry(TM) (maraviroc), approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in August, is a CCR5 antagonist and is different from other available oral HIV medicines because it works in a new way to fight the virus. Selzentry targets HIV outside of a patient’s immune cell, actually blocking the virus from entering, while all other oral HIV medicines works inside the immune cell, after completion of viral entry. Selzentry is indicated for use in certain treatment experienced adult patients whose HIV has become resistant to one or more currently available drugs. 48-week data from Pfizer’s ongoing clinical trials of Selzentry was presented at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in Chicago, on Tuesday, September 18. To help put these data in context and share his clinical experience with the drug as a study investigator, W. David Hardy, M.D., Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases and AIDS Unit at LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, speaks to us, on the heels of the data presentation. As one of the nation’s leading experts on HIV/AIDS and infectious diseases, and a clinical trial investigator Dr. Hardy is uniquely qualified to offer compelling insights into the “new” HIV epidemic and the steps that are being taken by the research and medical communities to address the growing challenge of treating the treatment experienced patient. For full prescribing information for Selzentry, including boxed warning, go to http://www.Selzentry.com . For more information on Pfizer’s patients assistance program, call 1-888-327-RSVP (7787 or visit the RSVP section of http://www.PfizerHelpfulAnswers.com . For more information, please log on to http://www.Selzentry.com More about Dr. David Hardy: Dr. David Hardy is an Associate Professor of Medicine-in-Residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), CA. He gained his medical degree from the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, in 1981, completed a residency in internal medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California in 1984 and a clinical fellowship in infectious diseases and immunology in 1986 at UCLA School of Medicine. Later in his career he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in basic retrovirology in 2002, also at the UCLA School of Medicine. A diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine, Dr Hardy is also a member of numerous professional societies including the American Academy of HIV Medicine, for whom he serves as a member of the National Board of Directors and Chairman of the California/Hawaii Chapter as well as the International AIDS Society. He works with several community organizations, including Project Angel Food, AIDS Project Los Angeles, and the Medical Advisory Committee of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Since 1988 he has been President of the Los Angeles Physicians AIDS Forum, which he co-founded. He has served on the scientific committees for various national and international HIV congresses. Dr. Hardy has been principal investigator on a number of HIV clinical trials, and is currently undertaking a 5-year NIH grant-funded study developing and optimizing HIV-1-based vectors for vaccine and gene therapy applications.