Anti-hiv Drug Targets

ANTI-HIV DRUG TARGETS HIV is a retrovirus, with a simple structure described in Box 1, and illustrated in Figure 1. It contains genes coding for a number of unique viral enzymes, required at different stages of the virus’s life cycle (see Box 2 and Figure 2). One of these is reverse transcriptase, required to make copies of the viral genes once it has infected human cells. Another is HIV protease, which is needed at the end of the viral life-cycle to ’snip’ viral proteins down to size for packaging into new HIV particles. All the antiretroviral drugs licensed for use against HIV infection to date (see Table 1) target one of these two HIV enzymes.