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So far tested on pigs, the small device has been designed to make life easier for patients suffering from HIV or other chronic diseases and requiring very rigorous care.
Perseverance is a challenge when you have to take medication every day or twice a day, for life.
“Studies have shown that in HIV clinical trials, only 30% of patients follow prescriptions,” he said. states in a statement from Brigham Hospital in Boston.
In this context, a patient who is less rigorous in performing antiretroviral therapy, which is expensive and has significant side effects, may allow the virus to reconstitute itself, develop drug resistance, or transmit the virus sexually.
The new pill is shaped like a capsule whose shell, once dissolved in the stomach, releases a four-centimeter-diameter star that can hold various drugs in its six corners. The pill was designed to last in the stomach, being too large to pass into the intestine without disturbing digestion.
In pigs, which have a similar digestive system to ours, “this low-dose dosing system has been shown to be more effective than the daily doses used in the treatment of HIV,” said Giovanni Traverso, one of the study authors. Harvard Medical School.
After fulfilling its mission, the star breaks into pieces and is ejected.
Researchers hope the pill will help eliminate 200,000 to 800,000 diseases over the next 20 years. However, before it is released, primate and possibly human tests are needed.
The study was published in the online issue of the scientific journal Nature Communications.
According to the United Nations AIDS Program, 1.8 million people were infected with HIV worldwide in 2016 and 36.7 million are carriers of the virus, of which more than 20 million are being treated with antiretrovirals.
35 years of research was not enough to find a way to cure or vaccinate against the disease, which has affected 70 million people and killed half of them since the early 1980s.
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