, 2007 and Geffen, 2009). We thank Matthew Campagna for technical support. This project was supported by Transformational Medical Technologies program contract [HDTRA1-09-CHEM-BIO-BAA] from the Department of Defense Chemical and Biological

Defense program through the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), NIH grants (AI061441 and AI084267-0109) and by the Hepatitis B Foundation through an appropriation from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. DAS and TDB thank the Glycobiology Institute for support. “
“Overall, 2 million people die of AIDS every year. The causative agent of this deadly disease, Human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1), is one of the most variable viruses. The high evolution rate helps the virus to escape from host immune surveillance, vaccines

and antiretroviral agents. The available antiretroviral compounds can only control viremia, and it is currently impossible to eliminate the virus from the organism, namely http://www.selleckchem.com/products/gdc-0068.html this website because HIV-1 provirus persists in the reservoir cells. During intercurrent infections, the provirus is repeatedly reactivated and disseminated into new cells, thus enlarging the pool of reservoir cells. Current therapeutic approaches consist of combinations of several drugs inhibiting various steps in HIV-1 growth cycle, but these drugs reveal serious side effects, and the virus often gains resistance to them (Mehellou and De Clercq, 2010 and Walmsley and Loutfy, 2002). Therefore, more potent and/or less toxic therapeutic approaches effective against HIV are intensively sought. Pathogenesis of HIV/AIDS infection is known to include an increased redox stress that is characterized by the increased production of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, decreased levels of reduced glutathione (GSH) and GSH-dependent Rho antioxidant mechanisms, as well as depletion of the main antioxidant enzymes, such as glutathione peroxidase,

thioredoxin or catalase (Pace and Leaf, 1995). The increased redox stress leads not only to the reactivation of the latent HIV-1 provirus, but also to an increased apoptosis and depletion of uninfected CD4+ cells (Pace and Leaf, 1995). The activation of the host cell is accompanied by the activation of the redox-sensitive transcription factor NF-κB (Lander et al., 1993 and Pantano et al., 2006) and its translocation to the nucleus (Greene, 1991), where it binds to the Long Terminal Repeat (LTR) of the integrated HIV-1 provirus and induces its replication (Nabel and Baltimore, 1987, Pyo et al., 2008 and Williams et al., 2007). The redox state of the cell thus simultaneously affects both activation of NF-κB and reactivation of the latent provirus. Current therapeutic approaches focus primarily on the inhibition of HIV-encoded enzymes reverse transcriptase and protease; fusion inhibitors and inhibitors of co-receptors or integrase are also available (Mehellou and De Clercq, 2010).