Reading about new treatments gives me a kind of anxiety: drug trials are so slow and the funding models are so removed from the actual human life-saving potential, that I just am filled with fear that this stuff will get mired in bureaucracy or otherwise defunded rather than getting FDA approved. I dread the idea that someone I know to get sick and die because we're so ploddingly slow at doing these trials.
For example: "DRACO" antivirals from MIT, were developed in 2011, and according to mouse model tests and tests on cultured human cells, is safe and effective against influenza and rhinovirus and everything else they threw at it (see http://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... for details), and yet it could be a decade before we even try to answer questions like "wait, does this cure HIV? It sounds like it might actually cure HIV"
The funding models actually aren't removed from the actual human life-saving potential. The NIH has been pushing translational research pretty heavily, and if anything there's been a fair amount of pressure on the basic science types to tie their research to something, anything that will manifest in Saving Lives.
Beyond that, it absolutely should take drugs many years to come to market. Research is hard. Research on human beings is very hard. You can't just take shots in the dark and hope something sticks - you have to understand how, and how well, something works. Even for the established antivirals we do have for HIV, we're still trying to figure out who to give them to and when.
For example: "DRACO" antivirals from MIT, were developed in 2011, and according to mouse model tests and tests on cultured human cells, is safe and effective against influenza and rhinovirus and everything else they threw at it (see http://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... for details), and yet it could be a decade before we even try to answer questions like "wait, does this cure HIV? It sounds like it might actually cure HIV"