New Drugs for the Treatment of HIV Infection.

Despite the availability of 15 approved drugs for the treatment of HIV infection, issues of convenience, tolerability, and antiretroviral activity make the continued development of newer drugs important. New drugs in clinical development represent both existing classes of antiretroviral agents--reverse transcriptase inhibitors (eg, diaminopurine dioxolane), nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (eg, capravirine), and protease inhibitors (eg, tipranavir and BMS-232632)--and newer classes of antiretroviral agents, such as nucleotide analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors (eg, tenofovir) and fusion inhibitors (eg, pentafuside). Newer drugs may offer improvements over existing agents by having simpler dosing schedules (once or twice daily), better tolerability, or improved virologic activity against wild-type or resistant virus. Continued advancements in HIV treatment will stem from ongoing development of antiretroviral drugs.