Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I am your host, pharmacist Eric Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening today. As always, go check out Real Life Pharmacology.com.

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All right, so today's drug is going to be a back of ear.

Brand name of this medication is zyogen, also abbreviated ABC.

And this drug is used in HIV management. It does also come in many pill combinations. So you may

see various drug names where it actually is in a combination of pills, which is important in HIV therapy because it helps reduce pill burden

and improves compliance, which helps reduce resistance and all sorts of different good stuff

in the management of HIV there.

It is classified as an antiretroviral agent,

a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor.

And if you remember how some of these drugs work,

mechanistically remember that it is a guanocene analog,

and it gets phosphorylated in the body and actually competes with natural substrates to inhibit reverse transcriptase.

Now, also, if you remember, HIV gets into CD4 cells and it uses its own reverse transcriptase

to change its own RNA into DNA.

That's why it's called reverse because it goes from RNA to DNA, which typically we go from

DNA to RNA in many normal biological processes.

But this virus is different in that it uses this reverse transcriptase enzyme.

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