Title:Discovery and Development of Anti-HIV Therapeutic Agents: Progress Towards Improved HIV Medication
VOLUME: 19 ISSUE: 18
Author(s):Kenji Maeda*, Debananda Das, Takuya Kobayakawa, Hirokazu Tamamura and Hiroaki Takeuchi*
Affiliation:National Center for Global Health and Medicine (NCGM) Research Institute, Tokyo 162-8655, Experimental Retrovirology Section, HIV and AIDS Malignancy Branch, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (NCI/NIH), Bethesda, MD, Institute of Biomaterials and Bioengineering, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), Tokyo 101-0062, Department of Molecular Virology, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), Tokyo 113-8519, Department of Molecular Virology, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), Tokyo 113-8519
Keywords:HIV, AIDS, Combination antiretroviral therapy, Reverse transcriptase inhibitors, Protease inhibitors, Integrase
inhibitors.
Abstract:The history of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS therapy, which spans over 30
years, is one of the most dramatic stories of science and medicine leading to the treatment of a disease.
Since the advent of the first AIDS drug, AZT or zidovudine, a number of agents acting on different drug
targets, such as HIV enzymes (e.g. reverse transcriptase, protease, and integrase) and host cell factors
critical for HIV infection (e.g. CD4 and CCR5), have been added to our armamentarium to combat
HIV/AIDS. In this review article, we first discuss the history of the development of anti-HIV drugs, during
which several problems such as drug-induced side effects and the emergence of drug-resistant viruses
became apparent and had to be overcome. Nowadays, the success of Combination Antiretroviral
Therapy (cART), combined with recently-developed powerful but nonetheless less toxic drugs has transformed
HIV/AIDS from an inevitably fatal disease into a manageable chronic infection. However, even
with such potent cART, it is impossible to eradicate HIV because none of the currently available HIV
drugs are effective in eliminating occult "dormant" HIV cell reservoirs. A number of novel unique
treatment approaches that should drastically improve the quality of life (QOL) of patients or might actually
be able to eliminate HIV altogether have also been discussed later in the review.