A mechanistic theory to explain the efficacy of antiretroviral therapy.

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, a diagnosis of HIV-1 infection was equivalent to a death sentence. The development of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) in the 1990s to combat HIV-1 infection was one of the most impressive achievements of medical science. Today, patients who are treated early with cART can expect a near-normal lifespan. In this Opinion article, we propose a fundamental theory to explain the mechanistic basis of cART and why it works so well, including a model to assess and predict the efficacy of antiretroviral drugs alone or in combination.

Related collections

Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Nat. Rev. Microbiol.

Title: Nature reviews. Microbiology

ISSN (Electronic): 1740-1534

ISSN (Print): 1740-1526

Publication date (Electronic): Nov 2014

Volume: 12

Issue: 11

Affiliations

[1 ] Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA.

[2 ] 1] Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA. [2] Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Baltimore, Maryland 21250, USA.

Article

Publisher Item ID: nrmicro3351

DOI: 10.1038/nrmicro3351

PubMed ID: 25263222

SO-VID: bfa6c036-f701-489f-a4c9-6b49b371f432

History

Data availability:

Comments

Comment on this article

scite_

Cited by 28

See all cited by