Treatment

Treatment

When AIDS first surfaced in the United States, there were no drugs to combat the underlying immune deficiency, and few treatments existed for the opportunistic diseases that resulted. Researchers, however, have developed drugs to fight both HIV infection and its associated infections and cancers.

HIV infection: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a number of drugs for treating HIV infection.

RT Inhibitors

The first group of drugs, called reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors, interrupts an early stage of the virus, making copies of itself. Nucleoside/nucleotide RT inhibitors are faulty DNA building blocks. When these faulty pieces are incorporated into the HIV DNA (during the process when the HIV RNA is converted to HIV DNA), the DNA chain cannot be completed, thereby blocking HIV from replicating in a cell. Non-nucleoside RT inhibitors bind to reverse transcriptase, interfering with its ability to convert the HIV RNA into HIV DNA. This class of drugs may slow the spread of HIV in the body and delay the start of opportunistic infections.

Protease Inhibitors

FDA has approved a second class of drugs for treating HIV infection. These drugs, called protease inhibitors, interrupt the virus from making copies of itself at a later step in its life cycle.