Some Medicines Need No Introductionβ¦
β¦and azidothymidine (zidovudine) is one of them. More commonly known as AZT, medicinal chemists, clinicians, and laypeople have recognized this acronym for 25 years as a key drug in the treatment of HIV infections. 1985 was an important year in the early history of HIV/AIDS research. Indeed, it's been a quarter century since the publication of seminal papers in Science by Luc Montagnier's research group in France, who first isolated the virus, and Robert C. Gallo and colleagues at the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), who clearly demonstrated that this retrovirus, then known as HTLV-III, is the causative agent of AIDS. It's also been 25 years since the start of the first randomized placebo-controlled study of AZT as an antiretroviral compound. The drug's efficacy in extending the lives of AIDS patients in 1985 led to near recordbreaking speed from AZT's initial laboratory demonstration of activity against HIV, to its approval for use by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in March 1987.
AZT has enjoyed 25 years of being in the limelight of anti-HIV drugs, but it had a rough start more than 20 years prior. The notion that most cancers were the result of viral infections had gained purchase in the 1950s and 60s, and so anticancer drug-discovery campaigns were largely directed toward compounds capable of diminishing the tumor-growth effects of such oncoviruses. A common approach to finding viable drugs back then involved the testing of randomly selected compounds for their activity against retroviruses-a sort of low-throughput screening strat-Full text: wileyonlinelibrary.com Homepage: www.chemmedchem.org ChemMedChem, European in origin but international in scope, deals with all aspects of drug discovery. It is co-owned by Chemistry Publishing Society Europe (ChemPubSoc Europe) and is published by Wiley-VCH. Contributions in ChemMedChem cover medicinal and pharmaceutical sciences, drug design, drug development and delivery, molecular modeling, combinatorial chemistry, target validation, lead generation, and ADMET studies, that is, research from the overlapping areas between biology, chemistry, and medicine. ChemMedChem publishes Communications and Full Papers, as well as Reviews, Minireviews, Highlights, Concepts, Essays, Book Reviews, and occasionally Conference Reports. Authors can submit manuscripts to ChemMedChem online through our homepage (see over) by clicking on "Submit an Article" and following the simple instructions.