Overview of Antiviral Activity – Antiviral Drugs

00:00 Welcome to Pharmacology by Lecturio. My name is Dr. Shukle and we're going to talk today about anti-viral agents.

00:09 The pharmacology of anti-viral agents is complex so what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at how viruses get into a mammalian cell first so that we can understand where each of these drugs work.

00:22 The first part of a viral entry is the attachment of the virus to the membrane of the cell.

00:30 This is where entry and fusion inhibitors act by inhibiting viral attachment and entry.

00:36 These drugs work very, very well in reducing the effectiveness of the virus to replicate.

00:43 The second stage of viral penetration is viral penetration.

00:47 This is where the interferon especially interferon alpha is quite effective.

00:51 The third stage is just the uncoating of the virus particle.

00:55 Now drugs like amantadine and rimantadine are very effective at preventing uncoating and therefore replication within the cell.

01:03 Now speaking of replication, one of the first stages of replication is early protein synthesis and then nucleic acid synthesis. In terms of nucleic acid synthesis we can inhibit a reverse transcriptase; I'll explain what that means in a minute.

01:18 The next stage or the last stage of protein synthesis is called late protein synthesis.

01:25 This is also processing of these proteins and this process is blocked by protease inhibitors.

01:32 We packaged up the virus and send it off into the interstitium through packaging and assembly steps.

01:40 This is blocked by maturation inhibitors.

01:43 And finally, we have viral release.

01:46 Some of the neuraminidase inhibitors like those that we use in influenza act at this stage to prevent the viral release.

01:54 So there's an overview of all of the viral drugs, now let's deal specifically with certain disease states.

02:01 So we have, in general, anti-HIV drugs, anti-herpetic drugs, drugs that we use in the treatment and prevention of influenza, and drugs that we use in other types of viral infections.

02:16 We're gonna focus first on the anti-HIV agents.