Antiretroviral Drug Development and HIV Cure Research

Dear Colleagues,

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) establishes a persistent infection that results in acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) if left untreated. Around 37 million people in the world live with HIV-1, with around 2 million new infections each year. While combined antiretroviral therapy (ART) has been shown to be very effective, inhibiting HIV-1 replication and preventing the development of AIDS, it has to be administered life-long, exposing the patients to possible side-effects. In addition, increasing emergence of resistance to ARV drugs could challenge ART efficacy, especially considering the international effort to reach 40% of HIV-infected people that live in developing countries and are yet to receive treatment. Therefore, despite ART effectiveness, the generation of new drugs against novel targets or with more favorable pharmacokinetics profiles and the development of novel delivery systems has to continue.

Furthermore, ART can limit HIV replication, but treatment interruption triggers a rapid viral rebound, indicating that HIV-1 forms long-lived reservoirs in infected individuals that persist despite decades of suppressive ART. An HIV cure remains a challenge and is not yet within reach. Depletion or silencing of the viral reservoirs has been considered the principal goal of HIV-1 curative strategies. However, very limited successes have been achieved so far, indicating the need for gathering more basic knowledge on HIV-1 latency in order to be able to design more effective therapeutic interventions.

In this Special Issue, we seek reviews and original research articles that discuss the latest developments in HIV drug development and drug delivery and approaches to understand HIV latency. The latter includes the interaction of HIV with human endogenous retroviruses. We hope to accelerate the design of novel strategies to eradicate this viral infection.

Prof. Enzo Tramontano
Prof. Dr. Ben Berkhout
Guest Editors

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