The new drug candidates, some tested on small numbers of people and others only in laboratory experiments, couldn't come at a more opportune time. The prospect that many new drugs may come to clinical use in a few years was greeted with both enthusiasm and caution by AIDS researchers at the 8th annual Retrovirus Conference, the annual midwinter AIDS conference in the United States. But one should never underestimate the virus's potential for malice and mischief. The road to today's HIV therapeutics, however, is littered with the bones of once-promising drugs. Paul Volberding, a prominent AIDS researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, likened the recent history of HIV therapy to the experience with bacterial pathogens over the last 50 years.
Scientific discovery keeps just ahead of the microbe's ability to evade treatment.
That's probably the way it's going to be until we get any better ideas. One of the more unusual compounds described yesterday is one called TMC-126. A Belgian company, Tibotec, is researching its potential as a drug at laboratories in Europe and Rockville. One of TMC-126's unusual properties is its extraordinary ability to bind to HIV protease. When mixed in a test tube with the enzyme, only 1 out of every 1 million trillion molecules of the compound is not firmly stuck to the enzyme.