Semester:Week 2 The presentation was based on the discovery and development of a HIV drug by Dr. Brian Johns who graduated with a degree in chemistry from Andrews University. He then received his PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from Wayne State University and followed with his NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia. He is currently the director of the HIV Medicinal Chemistry. In his career he has help invent over 40 patents and patent applications. As many may know there is HIV medication regimens in today's health care system. One would be happy in fact that there is an antiviral drug for a disease that has been marked as incurable. The problem as raised by Dr. John is that most of these regimens have to be administered more than once a day and involves taking at least a cocktail of pills. He and his group set out to decrease the daily dosage by making a pill that would bind to the enzyme that is involved in causing the virus to replicate its DNA. Plus formulating a pill that just has to be taken once a day with no other supporting pills. Besides the dosing interval, there are a lot of unmet medical needs when it comes to HIV; basic immunology sections have needs that have not been adequately met for example. There are several steps that involve designing and making compound. It goes through a series of biological assay testing, pharmacokinetic analysis, toxicological analysis, and finally a clinical trial. The approach is to first choose the disease and where you want to start, in Dr. John's case it was HIV, and finding a way to increase one-day intake, with a better resistance profile, that is tolerable and regimen based. The second step is identifying your target, which was where HIV integrates with the host DNA. He was able to find two metal binders that inhibit this enzyme. Since resistance is the Hercules heel for all antiviruses, it was the main thing that needed to be addressed. The main question is that after finding the right enzyme inhibitor, which would turn off the replication process, is there a way to totally eradicate the HIV DNA out of the host DNA. This would indicate curing the disease; sad to say we are a long ways a head of that scientific discovery.
