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Opinion: The decades-long journey to Gilead’s twice-a-year HIV prevention drug lenacapavir
Gilead’s twice-a-year HIV prevention drug lenacapavir is 30 years in the making. Here’s the story behind it.
On Thursday, the FDA approved lenacapavir, to be sold as Yeztugo, for the prevention of HIV in the U.S. The below essay, adapted from “Breakthrough: The Quest for Life-Changing Medicine” by William Pao, looks at lenacapavir’s decades-long journey to approval.
By the mid-1990s, the AIDS epidemic had become a pandemic, with more than 3 million new HIV infections and more than 1 million AIDS-related deaths each year. A million children, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, had been orphaned by AIDS. The numbers just kept going up and up.
