ABSTRACT
It has been more than 25 years since the first cases of AIDS were described, and even though the etiological agent responsible, HIV, was identified early in 1983, we are still in the midst of a global pandemic [1-3]. The development of specific inhibitors aimed at essential steps for viral infectivity and replication is a rapidly expanding field. The first therapeutic attempts at controlling replication and limiting transmission were focused primarily on the unique enzymes encoded by HIV: reverse transcriptase (RT), protease (PR), and more recently integrase (IN) [4]. The focus has broadened to include strategies that target structural proteins of HIV, and specifically the mechanisms used by HIV to infect a cell and replicate.
