Rahima Benhabbour, PhD, MSc, associate professor of Biomedical Engineering, led a successful effort to create an injectable implant that can release effective HIV PrEP medications into the body for six months in non-human primates.
For people at high risk of contracting HIV, missing doses of their daily HIV prevention pills can have big consequences. In some cases, missing a pill can lead to lack of protection against the virus.
Since 2017, the lab of Rahima Benhabbour, PhD, MSc, associate professor in the , has been working with a research team at the (CDC) consisting of J. Gerardo Garc铆a-Lerma, MSc, PhD, Ivana Massud, PhD, and Charles Dobard, PhD and others at 黑料网, to develop an injectable implant that can release HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medications into the body for a long period of time.
Their latest research, , shows that the team鈥檚 latest formulation can provide up to six months of full protection.
鈥淭his is the first time we showed 100% protection against multiple virus challenges in a macaque model of PrEP over an extended period of time,鈥� said Benhabbour, 鈥淥ur goal with this technology is a once or twice-yearly injection that could be self-administered.鈥�