Patient advocates are demanding Gilead lawsuit settlements to resolve claims that the drug maker knowingly sold harmful HIV drugs while keeping less dangerous drugs off the market.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) recent called for Gilead to establish a $10 billion victim compensation fund for patient harmed by the manufacturer’s tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) drug.

“We had two goals in putting this out,” AHF executive director Michael Weinstein said, according to Washington Blade. “One was to underline the significance of the liability that they are facing based on their conduct.”

“And second of all is simply to plant the idea in Gilead’s mind that ultimately the best resolution of this is to compensate the people who were harmed,” Weinstein said of the Gilead lawsuit settlement goals.

For years, TDF was the only tenofovir oral tablet available on the market in a patented formula by Gilead Sciences Inc., a prominent HIV/AIDS drug manufacturer. This drug required patients to take high doses in order to effectively treat HIV. As a result of these high doses, side effects such as kidney injury and decreased bone density were reportedly common.

Despite the drug being dangerous to consumers, Gilead allegedly continued to sell the product and downplay the risks while overselling the benefits.

More recently, Gilead has come under fire by consumers claiming that the company intentionally suppressed the development of tenofovir alafenamide (TAF). TAF is a safer tenofovir drug but would have allegedly undermined Gilead’s TDF patent profits, prompting the company to shelve the medication until their TDF patent ran out.

According to research from Canada’s CATIE, an HIV and Hepatitis C organization, TAF and TDF are similar in effectiveness. These results were found in two double blind trials of 1,733 HIV patients who took either 10 mg of TAF or 300 mg of TDF. Despite the TAF dosage being considerable smaller, the outcomes between the two drugs were similar.

Additionally, research reported by CATIE found that side effects on TAF were less severe than those seen with TDF. Although TAF was still associated with kidney injury and changes to bone mineral density, TAF patients reportedly experienced these issues less frequently and less severely than TDF patients.

Other research has found that TAF isn’t just in line with TDF. According to AidsMap, when boosted by another HIV drug, TAF reportedly showed “significantly higher rates of HIV RNA suppression” and “lower risks of renal and bone-related adverse events.”

Gilead lawsuits have been mounting against the drug manufacturer with more consumers claiming that the manufacturer purposefully suppressed research regarding TAF in order to continue their profits from the patented TDF formula.

Around the same time that the AHF called for Gilead lawsuit settlements, attorneys announced that they were filing a new personal injury lawsuit against Gilead in the Superior Court of California for Alameda County according to Yahoo Finance.

The newest lawsuit claimed that, in addition to acting in against public interests and selling a dangerous drug, Gilead failed to warn patients of the risks associated with TDF. Plaintiffs also claim that Gilead made misleading claims about TDF’s efficacy.