UoH team gets patent for HIV-1 infection therapy

Hyderabad: A new line of therapy to treat HIV-1 infection developed by a team at the University of Hyderabad has been granted a patent.

The therapy called Novel anti-HIV-1 heteroaromatic compounds targeted to HIV-1 associated Topoisomerase II beta kinase is the discovery of a new compound and has been accomplished through the efforts made by the team under the supervision of Prof. Anand K Kondapi. It was developed in the Laboratory for Molecular Therapeutics, Department of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, School of Life Sciences, UoH.

The current novel anti-HIV-1 drug candidates were prepared in a two-step process, the first one follows an eco-friendly green chemistry process involving water as solvent, while in the second step a salt is formed.

The result of this invention brings out several novel features such as, water solubility of the drug candidates, non-toxic and higher anti-HIV-1 activity at nanomolar concentrations with picomolar antagonism against TopoIIβKHIV-1 (a novel target discovered in the lab) leading to a highly significant inhibition of virus replication by blocking HIV-1 dsDNA synthesis during reverse transcription (as shown in model), a press release from UoH said.

The research team working in the R&D of these drugs is Kurumurthy Kammari, Akhila Bommakanti, Kiran Devaraya, Satyajit Mukhopadhyay and Sarita Swain.