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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Viral Genetics Inc. is a company that discovers and develops drug compounds to treat diseases such as cancer, Lyme disease, and HIV. The company discovers and develops immune-based therapies for autoimmune diseases using their thymus nuclear protein compound (TNP).

Viral Genetics recently entered into an Exclusive License Agreement with the University of Colorado and V-Clip Pharmaceuticals (a subsidiary of the company) to license technology developed by M. Karen Newell, PhD. This technology appears to explain TNP and provide a means to optimize therapies based on TNP for future clinical trials.

Thymus Nuclear Protein (TNP) is the core of their initial approach to the development of immune-based therapies. The company’s lead product candidate is VGV-1. It is an investigational treatment for HIV/AIDS, consisting of TNP suspended in adjuvant. TNP proteins were originally studied as a means of early-detection of certain cancers.

In early pilot studies, the company learned that if the protein was introduced

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