personalities ask the Gilead laboratory to lower the prices of a promising treatment

Several personalities have called on the pharmaceutical group Gilead to make accessible a treatment considered promising in the fight against HIV infections. This treatment, developed from the lenacapavir molecule, could “change the game” in the fight against HIV, responsible for AIDS, according to this open letter published Thursday May 30. The letter was notably signed by former heads of state, such as the former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, actors such as the actress Sharon Stone, and researchers, such as Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, co-discoverer of this virus in the 1980s.

Approved since 2022 by American and European health authorities, this treatment is considered particularly promising because it only requires two injections per year in people infected with the virus. This makes it a major hope for people “who do not have access to a good level of care system”, according to this letter, addressed to Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day. The signatories designate in particular the inhabitants of poor or developing countries, in particular in Africa where two thirds of people infected with HIV in the world live.

With Gilead’s treatment, AIDS could therefore “cease to be a public health threat by 2030”, they estimate. But they judge that the prices charged by Gilead will prevent lenacapavir, marketed under the name Sunlenca, from being accessible to patients in poor countries. In France, for example, its price exceeds 21,000 euros, and 42,250 dollars the first year in the United States. The signatories therefore ask the laboratory to open treatment rights to the Medicines Patent Pool, an organization linked to the United Nations, through which generic versions of a drug can be developed.