Exploring HIV Entry Blockade as a Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Strategy in Women

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an HIV prevention strategy in which HIV medicines are used by a person before they are exposed to HIV in order to decrease his or her chance of getting infected. In this study, we will investigate a new PrEP strategy in women using a drug called maraviroc, a medicine used in the treatment of HIV infection called a CCR5 antagonist. We hypothesize that maraviroc could be a particularly good drug for PrEP because it achieves high concentrations in the genital tract in women and decreases the number of HIV-susceptible cells in the genital tract, and thus could potentially be dosed in more favorable ways than the current PrEP drugs. In order to further evaluate this PrEP strategy, we plan to measure the amount of maraviroc in the blood and genital tract of HIV-negative healthy female volunteers before, during, and after they are given maraviroc dosed either in the standard (twice a day) or reduced (once a day) dose for 7 days compared with women who are not given maraviroc. We will also study immune cells from the blood and genital tract from these women to see if maravoric has an effect on these cells that would prevent them from becoming infected with HIV.