Niket got down from the bed & proceeded towards the chair. The injection still gave him some weird feeling inside. “Don’t worry”, said the doc, “it was just a plain HIV-I infection. I have injected the antidote – you will be totally cured within a day or so!” Surprised, aren’t we? But thanks to the ongoing upgradations in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, the day is not far away when HIV will have to remain contented, standing in line with extra-ordinary disorders.
The human civilization has been a constant prey of millions of diseases. We advanced our race – they too! From plagues to poxes to many others, the wins were on our side. HIV, however, entered the ring as a never-before kind of terror & the war took a very different turn, the basic obstruction being the inability of early-stage detection & failure behind creating antidote against the HIV retrovirus. But today, we have help on the door!
Boromycin (Chemical formula – C45H74BNO15, Molecular weight - 879.878 g/mol), a bacteriocidal polyether-macrolide isolated from Streptomyces antibioticus was found to have a good potential of having inhibitory effect on the replication of HIV-1 and HIV-2 laboratory strains LAV-1 and LAV-2ROD(IC50s 0.007 microgram/mL and 0.006 microgram/mL respectively) and HIV-1 clinical isolate strain KK-1(0.12microgram/mL). It is the first natural product found to us that contains Boron. Boromycin did not inhibit, the reverse transcription or integration of the HIV genome into the chromosomal DNA, but its prominent activity was that it reduced the release of HIV-1 particles from the infected tissues. It also showed positive results in blocking of the HIV infection at a later stage and also the maturity step of replication of the retrovirus.
More research is in process at well reputed laboratories all over the world, some of the main being CNRS (Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique) and Lead Generation Research Laboratory at Toda, Tanabe Seiyaku Co., Ltd.