Inhibition of HIV-1 entry by extracts derived from traditional Chinese medicinal herbal plants

Abstract

Background: Highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) is the current HIV/AIDS treatment modality. Despite the fact that HAART is very effective in suppressing HIV-1 replication and reducing the mortality of HIV/AIDS patients, it has become increasingly clear that HAART does not offer an ultimate cure to HIV/ AIDS. The high cost of the HAART regimen has impeded its delivery to over 90% of the HIV/AIDS population in the world. This reality has urgently called for the need to develop inexpensive alternative anti-HIV/AIDS therapy. This need has further manifested by recent clinical trial failures in anti-HIV-1 vaccines and microbicides. In the current study, we characterized a panel of extracts of traditional Chinese medicinal herbal plants for their activities against HIV-1 replication.

A Potential In Vitro and In Vivo anti‐HIV Drug Screening System for Chinese Herbal Medicines

“…A number of herbal medicines were shown, in both in vitro and in vivo experiments, to possess anti‐HIV properties (Liu, ; Park et al , ). However, a randomized, placebo‐controlled clinical trial of Chinese herbal drugs failed to show this effect (Weber et al , ).…”

Extracts of Moringa oleifera Lam. showing inhibitory activity against early steps in the infectivity of HIV-1 lentiviral particles in a viral vector-based screening

“…Some of these plantsderived antiretroviral therapies have been shown to have inhibitory activities against several HIV-1 processes, including viral entry, reverse transcription, replication, integration, virus maturation and virion budding. Some of these compounds have been clinically tested, with favourable results (Asres et al, 2005;Park et al, 2009;Vo and Kim, 2010;Jiang et al, 2010;Filho et al, 2010;Sing and Bodiwala, 2010).…”

Chemical Constituents of Plants from the Genus Trigonostemon

“…However, pre-treatment of the reporter virus with the extract and post-infection treatment had little effects on the infectivity or gene expression of the reporter virus. These results demonstrated that the extract inhibits HIV-1 replication likely by blocking HIV-1 interaction with target cells, i.e., the interaction between gp120 and CD4/CCR5, or gp120 and CD4/CXCR4, and points to the potential of developing the extract as HIV-1 entry inhibitors [24].…”