Welcome to Helix Talk, a podcast presented by the Rosalm Franklin University College of Pharmacy.

This podcast is produced by pharmacy faculty to supplement study material and provide relevant drug and professional topics.

We're hoping that our real-life clinical pearls and discussions will help you stay up to date

and improve your pharmacy knowledge.

This is an educational production, copyright Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.

This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not professional advice and should

not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified healthcare provider. And now, on to the show.

Welcome to episode 18 of Helix Talk. I'm your co-host Dr. Kane. I'm Dr. Schumann.

I'm Dr. Ketrow. And I'm Dr. Patel. And today we actually have Dr. Ketrow as a special guest because we're talking about some of the most popular agents for HIV.

So before we dive into the agents, I think it's important to first understand, you know, what are some of the drug targets as it relates to how HIV infects within the body and how it

replicates and kind of goes about its business. So Dr. Ketrel, can you kind of give us some

concept of some of the popular drug targets as it relates to how HIV works and things like

that? Sure. Overall, there are a few main

targets. So HIV is actually a retrovirus, so it comes as RNA and needs to be converted to DNA.

In order to do that, you need reverse transcriptase. And so reverse transcriptase is one of

the big targets. So we have our nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. These basically

act as false nucleosides or nucleotides and insert into the backbone for the RNA to be transferred

into DNA. So what you're saying then is that when reverse transcriptase tries to do its job,

we give drugs that make it so when it tries to make this DNA

molecule that our human cells use, it kind of gets in the way and makes it not be able to replicate

its own RNA into human-oriented DNA. Exactly. So there's early strand termination. Okay. Then there's

non-nucleicide reverse transcriptase inhibitors that actually inhibit the reverse transcriptase.

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