Word: azt
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...though, even Ronald Reagan knew that AIDS was a serious threat. The plague had encircled the globe, stretching from Africa to Asia. The antibody test revealed the presence of HIV in the blood supplies of the U.S., France and Japan. The FDA approved use of the antiviral drug AZT in a record 14 weeks...
Great idea, in theory. There was just one problem: no one knew how to stop HIV that quickly. AZT wasn't powerful enough to do it. The pharmaceutical companies, however, had just started looking at a new class of substances, called protease inhibitors, that might fit the bill. As it turned out, it took several years of testing to come up with a formula for a protease inhibitor that was effective against...
...year was 1994, and the new drugs were finally producing good results in the test tube. They worked against laboratory strains of the virus; they worked against viral samples taken from patients. Where AZT merely slowed viral reproduction, the protease inhibitors shut it down almost completely. Unfortunately, almost wasn't good enough. It often took less than a month for a few viral particles to mutate into a strain that was resistant to protease inhibitors. The new drugs were starting to look like another failure...
...single medication to destroy cancer cells. Too often, they have found, the one-drug approach allows a few malignant cells to survive and blossom into an even more lethal tumor. The AIDS researchers faced a similar problem with HIV. Whenever they prescribed a single drug, such as AZT, for their patients, a few viral particles would survive and give rise to drug-resistant...
...that the protease inhibitors had become available, doctors were eager to combine them with the old standby AZT and a third drug called 3TC. A couple of mathematical models--created by one of Ho's collaborators, Alan Perelson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory--suggested that HIV would have a hard time simultaneously undergoing the minimum three mutations necessary to resist combination therapy. He placed the odds at 10 million to 1. It was at least worth...