Science / Medicine : DDC Drug Made Available for AIDS

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week made Hoffman-La Roche’s drug DDC available to AIDS patients in a “compassionate use program” designed to test the safety of the drug, the pharmaceutical firm and the FDA announced Thursday.

“The most exciting thing about DDC is that it is looking more and more to be the drug that DDI was supposed to be,” said Dr. Jay Lalezari, co-director to the HIV Clinical Research Center at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco.

“We don’t know the efficacy, but it looks like it is well-tolerated,” he said.

New York-based Bristol-Myers has been distributing the experimental drug DDI free in a similar compassionate use program to about 8,000 patients who are not responding to AZT treatment or cannot tolerate AZT.

The side effects of DDI include nausea, diarrhea and depression, but DDC, which stands for dideoxycytidine, has shown few side effects, Lalezari said.