The company has since announced that it will terminate US development of adefovir. An accompanying editorial in JAMA reviews the development of drugs that are effective against drug-resistant HIV and cites the FDA decision. Its benefits must be balanced, however, with side effects that were manageable but did involve nausea and other gastro-intestinal problems as well as increasing kidney problems in about 60 percent of the patients over time. Among other positive results, the drug showed that it remained active when integrated with other antiretroviral drugs in a treatment regimen known as combination therapy. Combination therapy is designed to maximum the medication potency against HIV by striking at a variety of different biochemical mechanisms and at several vulnerable points in the viral lifecycle.
Every patient is different, so there is no universal combination drug therapy.
The combination needs to be adjusted and individually tailored for each patient for optimum benefit. Copyright 1999 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Last Updated . Please direct all comments and questions to the Daybreak Editor .