Microbicides for the Prevention of HPV, HIV-1, and HSV-2: Sexually Transmitted Viral Infections

Abstract

Sexually transmited diseases (STDs) can be transmited through genital-genital, orogenital, or anogenital contacts and remain to be a public health concern worldwide. Approximately one million people around the world are believed to be newly infected with sexually transmited infections (STIs) each day. Numerous causative agents including bacteria, viruses, protozoa, yeast, and fungi are responsible for STIs; however, viruses exhibit more serious risks, probabilities and outcomes of STDs than other organisms. The most lethal viral STIs are human immunodeiciency virus-1 (HIV), herpes simplex viruses 1 and 2 (HSV-1 and HSV-2), and human papillomavirus (HPV), which are responsible for major sexually transmited viral infections including AIDS, herpes simplex, and genital warts, respectively. Despite the fact that several prevention strategies such as vaccination, abstinence from sex, limiting sex partners, the use of condoms and a range of therapeutic drugs have drastically reduced the risk of contracting STIs, these three infections continue to spread at an alarming rate. The high incidence and lack of efective vaccine, instigated scientists to look for alternate, cheap, and eicient strategies for controlling these deadly viruses. Microbicide are relatively new approach that may be helpful in preventing STIs transmission when applied inside the genitals before intercourse. Like other interventions, microbicides are used as prophylactic measures against STIs. Therefore, an excellent safety and eicacy proile analysis is mandatory before their approval for human use. Although no safe and eicacious microbicide is yet available, many candidates including nonoxynol-9, Savvy, cellulose sulfate, Carraguard, VivaGel, tenofovir gel, and PRO 2000 have shown promising in vitro activity and many more are under development. However, very few of them have moved to large-scale phase III trials. This chapter aims to provide a brief overview of various microbicides along with their mechanism of actions and recent updates on safety and efectiveness trials.

20 years of herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) research in low-income and middle-income countries: systematic evaluation of progress made in addressing WHO priorities for research in HSV-2/HIV interactions, HSV-2 control and mathematical modelling

“…10 Following the result of the phase 2 clinical trials in Africa, Nonoxynol-9 was found to offer no protection against HIV and actually increased the risk of genital disease. 102 …”

Finite Difference Method for Infection Model of HPV with Cervical Cancer under Caputo Operator

“…Each year, more than 400000 new cases are reported worldwide, and more than 300 women's lives were lost to HPV-related causes in just 2018 [4]. Based on the severity of clinical manifestations, genital HPV types are divided into high-risk as subtypes (16,18,31,33,35,39,45,51,52,56,58,59, 68, 73, 82) associated with premalignant and malignant cervical, penile, vulvar, vaginal, anal, head, and neck cancers; and low-risk such as subtypes (6,11,42,44,51,53,83) that cause warts or benign, highly proliferative lesions on the genitals [5].…”