Antiviral resistance
Inhibitors of viral exit (release)
May 29, 2022Overview on antivirals and antiviral strategies
June 1, 2022Why is HIV hard to treat?
- Mutations in the active site of reverse transcriptase
- These changes selectively block the binding of the drug to DNA but allow other nucleotides to be added
How did resistance develop?
- HIV reverse transcriptase is very error-prone
- About half of all DNA transcripts produced contain an error (mutation)
- HIV has the highest mutation rate (3 x 10−5 per nucleotide base per cycle of replication)
- There is thus enormous VARIATION in the HIV population in a patient
- qNATURAL SELECTION now starts to act in the presence of the drug where certain variants are better able to survive and reproduce than others
- These variants produce more offspring and contribute more copies of their genes to the next generation
