Ingenol derivates promising for HIV eradication

Abstract

The eradication of HIV is at this moment one of the greatest challenges in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Despite the prolonged effectiveness of current anti-HIV therapies, capable of keeping patients with undetectable viremia for long periods of time, HIV-infected patients cannot be cured due to the establishment of HIV latent reservoirs. Therefore, several therapeutic strategies are being evaluated to eliminate these viral reservoirs. One of these strategies, termed “shock and kill”, aims to attack the latent reservoir by simultaneous treatment with HIV-activating agents to stimulate viral replication in latently infected cells and antiretroviral therapy to block new infections. A number of compounds have been suggested for the shock and kill strategy including histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACI), histone methyltransferases (HMT), DNA methyltransferase inhibitors (DNMTI), and protein kinase C (PKC) activators.