About FUZEON
About HIV Therapy
In order to understand how FUZEON works, it's important to have a basic understanding of how HIV therapy works. The goal of anti-HIV treatment is to slow or stop HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) from multiplying (replicating). HIV damages your immune system by attacking your "infection fighting" cells, called CD4 or T cells.
There are currently four classes of anti-HIV medicines that are available. These drug classes target specific steps in the HIV replication process, each in a different way — and in combination can work together to increase T-cell counts and lower the level of HIV in the blood.
The nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI), non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI) and protease inhibitor (PI) classes prevent the replication of HIV by working inside T cells after they have been infected with HIV. Fusion inhibitors (FI) differ from these other classes of anti-HIV medicines because they work outside of T cells to prevent HIV from fusing with, entering and infecting the cells.
FUZEON is the first and only fusion inhibitor to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of people living with HIV.
HIV Drug Resistance
It's important to find an HIV treatment regimen that you can commit to. Successfully adhering to your treatment regimen by taking the correct dose of each of your anti-HIV drugs every day is the most important thing you can do to help control HIV and minimize drug resistance.
If you miss doses or fail to take medications as prescribed, the level of anti-HIV drugs in your blood can become low enough that HIV quickly makes copies of itself. This sets the stage for HIV to develop resistance to anti-HIV medications. When this happens, viral load goes up and T-cell counts can go down, signaling treatment failure.
As with other anti-HIV medicines, it is possible to develop resistance to FUZEON.
To learn if FUZEON might be right for you, take a quick self-assessment.
View the Patient Product Information.
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