Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 9, Issue 18, 2003

A considerable progress has been made in recent years in the field of drug development against HIV. However, the current cost of AIDS drugs is the main obstacle that prevents their use in developing countries, where 95% of HIVinfected patients reside. The average yearly price of AIDS therapy and related health care of affected patients in the USA runs as high as $22,000 - an amount that corresponds to the combined income o Read More

Seizure disorders may complicate HIV disease, either as a direct result of HIV or as a manifestation of a secondary opportunistic infection. Unless a reversible cause of seizure activity can be discerned, current treatment guidelines recommend the use of anticonvulsant drugs in these patients. The concurrent use of antiretrovirals and anticonvulsants is a poorly studied area. Controlled clinical trials examining drug-drug and dru Read More

Phospholipid analogs are a new class of compounds with potent activity against HIV infection when used alone or conjugated with other therapeutic agents. When conjugated to the nucleoside analog AZT, the resulting phospholipid- AZT conjugate can double target the virus replication cycle by inhibiting the viral reverse transcriptase (by AZT) and inducing the production of defective virus particles that lack functional gp120 expr Read More

HIV-1 entry is an attractive target for anti-HIV-1 therapy. However, there are no entry inhibitors approved for the clinical treatment of HIV-1 infection. This is likely to be changed in the near future since promising HIV-1 entry inhibitors, such as T20 and some chemokine receptor antagonists, are in the pipeline to join the repertoire of anti-HIV-1 therapeutics. This review will focus on what might be potential targets Read More

Over 80 different α-defensin or β-defensin peptides are expressed by the leukocytes and epithelial cells of birds and mammals. Although their broad spectrum antimicrobial properties makes them candidates for therapeutic development, technical limitations related to their size (typically 30-45 residues) and complex structure have impeded such development. The minidefensins covered in this review are antimicrobial pep Read More

Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has prolonged many patients' lives, but many cardiac sequelae of HIV are not affected by HAART and continue to develop even with treatment. In addition, HAART itself causes in a high proportion of patients a metabolic syndrome, characterized by lipodystrophy / lipoatrophy, dyslipidemia and insulin resistance that may be associated with an increase in peripheral artery and coronar Read More