Affordable generic HIV drug is launched in Kenya

A new affordable generic version of a frontline antiretroviral drug was launched in Kenya on 28 June 2017, the first time that HIV patients will have access to the more affordable version of the treatment.

Dolutegravir (DTG) will be available to patients through a partnership between the Kenyan Ministry of Health and the Geneva-based company Unitaid.

DTG has been the preferred first-line treatment in the United States and Canada since 2014, a year after it came onto the market. Prior to the current introduction, Kenyan patients paid $50-$60 for a 30-day supply pack. This generic version costs about $4 a pack.

The generic DTG launch is part of a $34-million three-year Optimal ARV project by Unitaid and the Clinton Health Access Initiative aimed at accelerating access to affordable antiretroviral treatments across 11 countries.

Globally, there are more than 36 million people living with HIV, of which roughly half are untreated. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that by expanding the use of antiretroviral therapy, almost 600,000 deaths can be prevented each year by 2020.

Scaling up HIV treatment in low- and middle-income countries has been a major health success over the past 15 years. However, ensuring that more people living with HIV have access to medicine is crucial to ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030.

DTG was approved for use in 2013 in the United States and Canada, and was adopted the following year by the European Commission as a first-line drug. Since 2015, WHO has also recommended DTG as the alternative first-line treatment. Last year, Botswana became the first African country to purchase DTG.

DTG has been recognized as the optimal treatment in recent years because of its superior efficacy: providing better treatment outcomes to patients taking them, fewer side effects, and higher barrier resistance, meaning the HIV virus is less able to develop resistance. If resistance to HIV medicine builds, a patient must be switched to second- or third-line treatments that can cost up to 10 times more.

The generic DTG will be offered through a “catalytic procurement” process that will initially work with public health facilities, prioritizing patients intolerant of the current first-line treatment, Efavirenz.

Over the next six months, Kenyan health officials will have an opportunity to address large-scale rollout plans, discuss how health care providers can access the medicine, and prepare distribution channels before prescribing significantly higher volumes next year.

Twenty-seven thousand people in Kenya are expected to benefit from the DTG treatments.

Devex, 28 June 2017

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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