What Should Clinicians Know About Long-Acting Injectables?

Segment Description: Susan Swindells, MBBS, professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, provides an overview of long-acting cabotegravir + rilpivirine for clinicians.

Contagion®: What should clinicians know about long acting cabotegravir + rilpirine?

Swindells: So first, I think it's important to remember it's a 2-drug regimen, many of the ones we use are 3-drug regimens. So, it's not perhaps suitable for absolutely everyone if they have failed treatment before and have a lot of resistance, for example.

Patients are going to have to come every month and get an injection — right now, the injections have to be administered by a health care professional – it's not like an insulin injection you can just do yourself. And, that's not likely to happen anytime soon, so, if patients might have difficulty doing that would be a consideration.

The other issue we have to think about is a different treatment paradigm. If you have someone who's supposed to be on scheduled monthly injections and then they don't show up. What do you do? How do you handle that when someone's late for an injection or has missed one?

And, so it's a little different from the way we manage HIV now with the oral tablets, where we have a better idea of what to do. So, we're going to have a learning curve about how to manage that and some different administrative rearrangements of what people do in their HIV clinics to be able to deliver this.