Triphylactin

Triphylactin, is a recently developed drug that has the capability of curing a person infected with the HIV virus. Secretly created by a team of biochemists and virologists funded by the United States government. It is currently waiting approval by the FDA, which is expected to happen very soon.

Origins
The trouble with the current antienzyme approach to combat HIV is a problem in structural chemistry. Usually doctors design these drugs to have a particular shape that allows them to glom directly onto the enzymes and 'glue up the works.' But by making small modifications at the level of the gene, a virus can effect relatively large structural changes in the enzymes it codes for. Large enough changes to eventually render drugs useless.

Currently, the first line of defense for HIV infection is usually a drug to inhibit reverse transcriptase, an enzyme HIV uses to convert its single-stranded RNA into double-stranded DNA, which is then incorporated into the genome of a host cell to begin the cycle of infection. The drug is often coupled with a second one that inhibits protease, a scissors-like enzyme that works inside infected cells to cut up strands of genetic material used by the established virus to replicate itself.

About a dozen companies currently market a few dozen HIV drugs or drug combinations. The antienzyme drugs have had some success in slowing down the progression of HIV/AIDS, but none of them is free from sometimes debilitating side effects and none so far is completely effective because of mutating strains of HIV.

Structural chemistry can only take us so far. What was needed were drugs that work at the level of the gene, not the protein. Instead of structural chemistry, what must be dealt with was the informational chemistry of HIV. Meaning, designed drugs that recognize the viral gene sequences directly, and not the products of host gene sequences, as doctors had been doing.

Function
Triphylactin works directly on the gene coding for an enzyme to stop the enzyme from being built in the first place. To achieve this, scientists had to design a set of man-made nucleobases that could be incorporated into a third strand of material that could bind to DNA to form a triple helix. These artificial bases--designated L and O--combine with the natural bases cytosine (C) and thymine (T) to produce a four-letter alphabet called CLOT in recognition of what it does. Strands of synthetic DNA made from these four bases can wrap around any selected gene sequence.

The resulting drug doesn't rely on a single molecular interaction, as enzyme inhibitors do, that can be foiled by a mutating HIV strain. Instead, it contains artificial genelike segments that are programmed to home in on and wrap around the corresponding HIV gene sequences. For HIV, Triphylactin literally presents the virus with a molecular straitjacket against which even mutation provides no hope of defense.