Anti-HIV Agents: Maturation Inhibitors – Antiviral Drugs

00:01 The next category are the maturation inhibitors.

00:04 The maturation inhibitors - there are many now.

00:07 A lot of them are alpha-numeric letter combinations because the medication hasn’t really been named yet so these are very new but I wanna put this is in the lecture slide set not necessarily because I think they're going to be on your exam but because at some point in the future they're going to be on your exams so you might as well learn about them now.

00:29 Now, the interesting thing about this class of medications is that they’ve been isolated from a Chinese herb.

00:35 It is not yet approved for use so this part of the lecture, if you're really stressed and you're not sure what to study, you can kinda skip this part but I just wanna go over it so that you'll understand where they come from.

00:51 These are drugs that interfere with normal viral replication.

00:56 Remember that normal viral replication requires the breakdown of a capsid protein so that the replication can occur.

01:05 This particular drug block this cleavage and they enter into that growing virus bud and disrupt the cellular or the virus process.

01:16 As the capsid remains bound, normal virus particle core compression can't happen so the essential portions of viral replication are interfered with these maturation inhibitors.

01:30 So what you end up with is a virus that’s not properly compressed, it’s immature and it’s a non-infectious particle so even though we will pick up particles on an electron microscope for example, they're immature and they’re not really particularly virulent.

01:49 Resistance can occur.

01:50 Resistance actually can be quite frequent in these drugs with initial trials and it’s because some of the patients will have mutations in their genome to prevent this drug from doing what it’s doing.

02:04 However, in a glass half full kind of a situation, 50% of patients do respond to the medication if they don’t have the mutations.