Chinese herb may yield drug for AIDS

Washington, Aug 8 (UNI) Over 20 drugs, and at least 82 additional HIV therapies in development, to suppress the AIDS virus will be presented at the International AIDS Conference which convenes next week in Toronto, Canada.

Of these, the most promising is a Chinese herb experimental therapy which may yield a drug to prevent AIDS, according to researchers.

An experimental drug, based on an Chinese herb known by the Latin name Syzigium claviflorum, has been used in Taiwan to treat diarrhea and stop bleeding. Now its derivative is being tapped to fight HIV by a small biotechnology company in Maryland.

If approved by the Food and Drug Administration, bevirimat, developed by Panacos Pharmaceuticals Inc, would represent the first in a new class of drugs that uses an unusual approach to block maturation of the AIDS causing virus.

But as quickly as drug companies find ways to curb HIV, the virus develops a new survival strategy. Nearly 30 percent of HIV-positive Americans have viral infections that were resistant to at least one drug in the multidrug regimen that keep them alive.

Researchers at the HIV Drug Resistance Programme of the National Cancer Institute are desperately trying to find new compounds and novel mechanism of action to counter the effects of the HIV virus.

The HIV virus can't make copies of itself; instead it gets into a human cell to borrow its replication machinery. Bevirimat interrupts the process at a key stage, resulting in harmless, immature HIV copies that the body quickly flushes.

The therapy is exciting, AIDS specialists say, even though it is at least three years from being developed for the market, because it could offer a completely new tool to combat a 25-year-old disease.

Bevirimat works later in the virus life cycle than protease inhibitors, which have been the mainstay of AIDS therapy. That hints at the opportunity to use bevirimat in potent combination with existing drugs, said Dr Daniel R Kuritzkes, director of AIDS research at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, according to the Boston Globe.

More UNI XC SB GC0951