New strategies for treating AIDS

To date, the effective management of HIV-1 infection by anti-retroviral drugs has proved remarkably difficult to achieve. This is primarily due to the ease with which HIV-1 becomes resistant to drugs which initially may be very effective at blocking viral replication. In a recent issue of Science, two promising new AIDS treatments were reported. The first described the use of retroviral-type zinc finger structures found in the HIV-1 nucleocapsid protein as targets for antiretroviral drugs⁽¹⁾. The second demonstrated the feasibility of the reverse transcriptase inhibitor (R)-9-(2-phosphonylmethoxypropyl) adenine as a postexposure prophylaxis in blocking HIV-1 infection⁽²⁾.