China approves first home made anti-HIV drug

Albuvirtide could potentially enhance patient compliance, improve quality of life and reduce treatment costs for HIV-infected patients, it wrote.

Current HIV treatments used in China are either generic or imported. AIDS and HIV patients mostly took a handful of pills every day, Peng Xiaohui, a sexologist at Central China Normal University, told the Global Times.

"China's first domestically developed drug offers new HIV patients a new treatment option. We hope to dispel the fact that China has not developed good anti-AIDS medicine," Xie Dong, chief scientist and former head of Frontier Biotechnologies Inc was quoted by the Science and Technology Daily as saying.

Several companies are developing long-acting AIDS drugs in China, but only Frontier's drug has been approved, the Xinhua report said.

Peng said the patients have to overcome psychological obstacles first since they need to inject medicine on their own or have a doctor do it for them.

According to official data China has 718,270 people suffering from HIV/AIDS in China.

As of the end of June last year, 221,628 people had died of AIDS-related diseases in China, according to a Xinhua report of December 2017.