Does antiretroviral therapy treats and prevents HIV/AIDS?

 

The recent state-of-the-art treatment modality for HIV/AIDS is HAART, where three or more antiretroviral drugs are given to patients at once. The drugs used in mixture are in most cases from different classes that work based on different devices. Despite the remarkable achievements with the current HAART treatment for HIV/AIDS, there are still several challenges remaining. The major difficulty has been the disappointment of the treatment, typically due to poor patient submission. Due to the need to take the medication daily for a lifetime, patients fail to stand by the treatment schedule, leading to ineffective drug levels in the body and recoil of viral replication.

Moreover, in some patients, the virus develops fighting to particular combinations of drugs even with good loyalty. Drug resistance is mainly caused by the high genetic range of HIV-1 and the continuous mutation it experiences. This problem is being addressed with personalized therapy, whereby resistance testing is performed to select a combination of drugs that is most operative for each patient . In addition, side effects due to toxicities of the drugs are also a alarm.

Under present-day treatment, complete eradication of the virus from the body has not been likely. The major cause for this is that the virus lives in ‘latent reservoirs’ within memory CD4⁺ T cells and cells of the macrophage–monocyte family . A major study recently establish that, in addition to acting as latent tanks, macrophages significantly contribute to the generation of elusive mutant viral genotypes by serving as the host for viral genetic recombination