Cape Town - A senior pharmacy lecturer at UWC wants to make Antiretroviral (ARV) drugs more child friendly.
Dr Marique Elizabeth Aucamp,
38, took on this project after noticing the growing number of children in South Africa who have HIV and find the taste of the treatments difficult to bear.
“With almost 2 million children suffering from HIV, knowing how unpleasant ARVs taste, how could I not work towards a solution to this problem?” she said.
The idea is to mask the taste
of some of the first-line ARVs by
forming a capsule around drug
particles.
“This capsule or shell will then control the release of the particular ARV, aiming for zero drug release in the mouth cavity,”
She said that the current treatment strategies for children receiving ARV therapy involved making use of adult dosage forms and either breaking the tablet or opening up the capsule
shell, which could then result in the child not getting the correct dosage of the medication.
“The ARVs are also extremely bitter tasting, thus resulting in children not wanting to take the treatment, even when mixed with food or other syrups,” she said.
She said that the product was
still in proof-of-concept phase and it will be a few years before it will be on the market.
Dr Leigh Johnson, epidemiologist at UCT, who spoke at the Aids
Conference in Durban last week, said there had been a decline in the
Western Cape’s overall HIV incidence rate and that one of the biggest challenges was getting people who suffer from the disease to take the unpleasant-tasting treatments.