Thursday, March 5, 2009

Drugs for HIV/AIDS

Currently, there are 30 antiretroviral drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat people infected with HIV. These drugs fall into four major classes.

1. Reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors interfere with the critical step during the HIV life cycle known as reverse transcription. During this step, RT, an HIV enzyme, converts HIV RNA to HIV DNA. There are two main types of RT inhibitors.

  • Nucleoside/nucleotide RT inhibitors are faulty DNA building blocks. When these faulty pieces are incorporated into the HIV DNA (during the process when the HIV RNA is converted to HIV DNA), the DNA chain cannot be completed, thereby blocking HIV from replicating in a cell.


  • Non-nucleoside RT inhibitors bind to RT, interfering with its ability to convert the HIV RNA into HIV DNA.

2. Protease inhibitors interfere with the protease enzyme that HIV uses to produce infectious viral particles.


3. Entry and fusion inhibitors interfere with the virus' ability to fuse with the cellular membrane, thereby blocking entry into the host cell.

4. Integrase inhibitors block integrase, the enzyme HIV uses to integrate genetic material of the virus into its target host cell.

5. Multidrug combination products combine drugs from more than one class into a single product.

Currently available drugs do not cure HIV infection or AIDS. They can suppress the virus, even to undetectable levels, but they cannot eliminate HIV from the body. Hence, people with HIV need to continuously take antiretroviral drugs.

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