On Jul 16, Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD) entered into a license and collaboration agreement with Tibotec Pharmaceuticals, a unit of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), for the development of a once-daily antiretroviral HIV pill.

The companies are looking to develop a combination pill that will combine Gilead's Truvada with Tibotec's TMC-278, a non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI), for use in treatment-naïve HIV patients. If successfully developed and approved, the combination pill would be the second complete antiretroviral treatment for HIV to be available in a single pill. The use of single pills makes treatment simpler for patients.

Gilead's Atripla is the first once-daily pill to be available in the HIV market. Atripla is a combination of Truvada, itself a fixed-dose combination of two nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTI): Viread and Emtriva, and Sustiva, an NNRTI manufactured by Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY).

In addition to the treatment-naïve patient population, we believe the

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