A drug that can prevent one from getting infected with HIV… isn’t that what the world prays for? Well..Gilead Sciences Inc. may be one of the first drugmakers in history to have people asking why it’s not doing more to pitch its medicine.
Truvada, Gilead’s HIV drug, has been approved since 2004 for people with the virus. In 2012, use was expanded to people without HIV as a way of preventing transmission — a practice called PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis. Taken daily, it can prevent infections 92 percent of the time, meaning it could drastically reduce new infections in sexually active gay men, among the U.S.’s highest-risk communities.
Thanks to its use in HIV patients, Truvada’s been a financial success, bringing Gilead $1.79 billion in the U.S last year. Yet out of 3.3 U.S. million prescriptions from January 2012 to March 2014, only 3,200 were for prevention.
There are many reasons: Gilead says PrEP isn’t a moneymaker, so the drugmaker doesn’t pitch the medicine to many of the primary care doctors who see healthy, HIV-negative gay men most likely to benefit from Truvada. Patients and advocates say doctors often don’t know about the medicine, and some insurance plans leave patients with copays as high as $1,300, making use by the healthy less affordable.
The result is thousands of people who could significantly lower their HIV risk, yet don’t. Some 50,000 Americans are diagnosed with HIV each year, with the highest rates among young gay males, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yet in November, Gilead said that 42 percent of PrEP prescriptions written through March 2014 were for women, and only 7.4 percent were for men younger than 25.
