Participating entities
IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute
The emergence of drug resistance and the need for simplified treatment and management options for HIV patients with co-infections (e.g., HCV) treated over the long term is an obstacle to effective reduction in AIDS incidence and prevalence. We have created an interdisciplinary team to design, develop and evaluate antiviral strategies, whose members have identified, optimized and patented one antiviral agent generated in our previous project. We wish to expand our antiviral development programme by modelling and designing new rational agents and targets, standardizing new evaluation systems aimed at blocking HIV and HCV replication and developing new antiviral compounds. Specific objectives include: (1) standardization of biological assays to evaluate low-molecular-weight synthetic (non-peptide) molecules as inhibitors of HIV fusion mediated by gp41 and to evaluate HCV NS3-4A protease inhibitors; (2) protein modelling, compound design and enumeration and selection of virtual chemolibraries of compounds with anti-HIV and anti-HCV potential; (3) combinatorial synthesis of chemolibraries of compounds with anti-HIV and anti-HCV potential; and (4) determination of antiviral resistance mechanisms of compounds isolated according to the above objectives.
