Treatment of AIDS: Development of Medicine by Innovation with Special Emphasis on Protease Inhibitors

ABSTRACT

In the light of the recent events in the world concerning COVID-19 virus, it is important to review the challenges faced by the world by another pandemic, AIDS. The painstaking research by the scientists, the pharmaceutical companies, the medical professionals have led to this day when AIDS patients are living their whole life span. Though we do not have any vaccine for AIDS but by intelligent use of medication, we have been able to combat the disease to a large extent. HIV is a RNA virus, whose treatment is mainly done by finding the structure and function of the proteins that are vital to its life cycle. Designing a drug/inhibitor to make those proteins ineffective constitutes the next step. WHO has recognized AIDS as a pandemic almost 40 years back but the world is yet to find a cure or a vaccine. The current treatment method is called HAART, Highly Active Anti Retroviral Therapy, where different types of inhibitors,eg. Reverse Transcriptase inhibitors, Protease inhibitors;each arresting a different important protein are given in combination. The virus replicates very fast and forms mutations which render it ineffective to the inhibitors thus resistance to the inhibitors develop. Hence development of new types of inhibitors is crucial to the problem. There are certain similarities between AIDS and COVID-19, both in terms of the attacking virus and effective medication, which make it more important than ever that the research on HIV is revisited and knowledge we gain from it is used to battle the new pandemic.