Russian biologists, together with colleagues from Italy and the United States, have developed a prototype drug that can prevent the assembly of new copies of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The scientists’ work has been published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
Until now, it is almost impossible to cure HIV – highly active antireroviral therapy helps fight viruses, but does not completely cure patients.
Researchers from the Federal Research Center for Biotechnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have created a new class of compounds to fight the virus, including the “sleep” mode. To do this, they created more than 250 candidate compounds and their effect was tested on reverse transcriptase, the enzyme responsible for the intracellular replication of wild-type HIV.
The resulting prototype drug has the ability to kill HIV in “den” neurons. It can penetrate neurons through the blood-brain barrier, destroy the virus there, and inhibit the functioning of HIV reverse transcriptase. The scientists also emphasize that the molecule remains completely safe for neurons.
Source: Ferra
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