HIV drug cuts viral load, boosts immunity in Yale study

A Yale University study has found ibalizumab reduced viral replication and increased the count of immune cells in HIV patients, raising hopes for a new form of treatment for the disease. Approved therapies use a cocktail of nucleoside and nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors to prevent viral replication, usually taken as a triple combination in case the virus develops resistance to one of the components. But ibalizumab has a different mechanism of action, binding to CD4, the main receptor for HIV, inhibiting viruses from entering cells. It is already approved for multidrug-resistant HIV and is manufactured by TaiMed biologics under the trade name Trogarzo.