POZ Community Forums
Meds, Mind, Body & Benefits => Research News & Studies => Topic started by: John2038 on November 03, 2011, 03:37:20 pm
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UC Merced professor designs powerful chemical inhibitor against HIV
In a significant step toward reducing the threat of HIV, UC Merced Professor Patricia LiWang has designed what may be the most effective chemical inhibitor against infection of the virus.
"We need a fairly wide arsenal of HIV drugs because the virus is always mutating," LiWang said. "Drugs become less effective as time goes on."
LiWang's inhibitor, a novel combination of two existing drugs, has a strength that ranges from several times better than existing inhibitors to several hundred times better, depending on the strain of HIV. The inhibitor works by blocking HIV from entering a person's cell at two different steps of viral entry. This so-called "entry inhibition" is at the forefront of new strategies for stopping the virus. Other existing inhibitors have different strategies, such as preventing HIV from carrying out activities like replicating or integrating into the human genome.
There are hundreds of different strains of HIV, LiWang said, and the virus mutates when it gets inside a person's body.
"However, since this drug is a combination of two inhibitors, it would be nearly impossible for a virus to mutate so it wouldn't get hit with either one of these drugs," she explained.
More (http://www.news-medical.net/news/20111103/UC-Merced-professor-designs-powerful-chemical-inhibitor-against-HIV.aspx)
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Given the high rate of mutation of the virus, I am somewhat skeptical of the claims that these two novel drugs would render HIV mutation impossible.
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^^ I concur...unless these drugs kill off all the virus before it can mutate. But that doesn't even sound logical when there are reservoirs that current potent HAART cannot seem to eliminate.
We need to hear more about what this drug/s actually do.
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From reading the article, it sounds like this is a single protein that works in two different ways to block HIV replication. Instead of needing multiple classes of drugs to block the virus in different ways at the same time to prevent mutation, this protein does it all with only a single drug. The reason why this is so advantageous and resistant to mutation is because since there is only one drug, it'll always be consistent in any one place in the body, i.e. there will no longer be the effect of one drug's half-life being shorter than another thereby increasing the odds of one part of the body not having enough of one class of drug to prevent mutation. This single drug will either be present fighting the virus on two different fronts at the same time at the same rate or not fighting it at all.. hence mutation against it is almost impossible.