Anti-HIV therapy: pipeline approaches and future directions

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), with about 30 million deaths and double infections (in developing countries), is an open challenge today for global scientists. Developing safe and effective measurements against it has become the prime need of hour. Though, putting it at health priority, various efforts like chemotherapy, vaccines and others are attempted globally over last decade. Consequently, highly active antiretroviral therapy was introduced but fails to completely block the viral replication due to drug resistance and various other severe side effects. The antigenic variability and lack of appropriate experimental models is the major obstacle in the development of an ever effective treatment against HIV. However, to overcome the present hurdles and to emerge a preventive HIV vaccine efforts at various platforms are done. A renewed, coordinated research, preclinical studies, clinical trials together with sufficient long term scientific and commercial commitments are made. Few of the therapeutic efforts viz. RNA interference (RNAi) based replication arrest of HIV, viral enzymes’ inhibitors, nanotechnology based HIV control and various preclinically trialed vaccines are reviewed in this paper. Also, the observed toxicity of existing therapeutic regimen, key challenges and future prospects for the development of better tolerated prophylactic HIV-1 vaccine are discussed