Anti HIV agent-maraviroc.

Antiviral medicines have transformed AIDS, into a manageable, chronic illness in those patients who can access the drugs. The amount of the virus circulating in the body can be reduced to negligible levels with regular doses of a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs that act by different mechanisms, such as protease inhibitors and reverse transcriptase inhibitors. However, the virus mutates to evade the drugs' activity, and in the long term they lose their effectiveness. Thus further medicines that remain active are much needed.

Various different points of the virus' lifecycle have been targeted by drugs, one of the most recent being HIV entry, which suppresses viral infectivity as well as replication. The viral entry process begins with the virus attaching to the surface of the T cells then binding to the CD4 receptor through the gp120 envelope glycoprotein. This unmasks the coreceptor binding site, usually either CCR5 or CXCR4, and allows coreceptor binding, which induces, further conformational changes allowing pre-formation and the fusion of virus and cell membranes.