Over the past decade, anti-human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) drugs have been introduced sequentially for use in the clinic. Currently, patients are routinely being treated with 3 or 4 drug combinations including nucleoside/tide analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs/NtRTIs), non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs), protease inhibitors (PIs), and/or fusion inhibitors. New potent antiretroviral (ARV) compounds that work in people whose HIV-1 virus is resistant to available drugs are urgently needed. This is a Phase III, randomized (study medication is assigned by chance), double-blind (neither the study physician nor the patient knows the name of the study assigned medication), double-dummy, active-controlled trial to compare the effectiveness, safety, and ability to tolerate TMC278 versus efavirenz (EFV). The study will last for 104 weeks which includes a screening period of 4 weeks, a 96-week treatment period, followed by a 4 week follow-up period. Patients will be randomly assigned (like tossing a coin) to TMC278 or to efavirenz in combination with two other anti-HIV drugs of the class nucleoside/nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The hypothesis to be provided in this study is that the investigational drug TMC278 will perform just like efavirenz (EFV) in terms of antiviral effectiveness (i.e., suppressing of the plasma viral load to a level \< 50 HIV-1 RNA (ribonucleic acid) copies/mL, in ARV-naïve HIV-infected patients. During the trial, patients' health will be monitored by physical examination, interview to assess health and well being, and laboratory testing on blood and urine samples. Experimental Group: One tablet of TMC278 25 mg daily; plus efavirenz (EFV) placebo; plus 2 nucleoside/nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors; Control Group: One tablet of Placebo daily that looks just like TMC278 plus EFV 600 mg daily plus 2 nucleoside/nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors for 104 weeks.
