Gold nanoparticles might improve the effectiveness of HIV drug

Adding tiny bits of gold to a failed HIV drug improves the drug's ability to stop the virus from invading the body's immune system, says the Researchers at North Carolina State University. One can find the full article online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Discarded in the past due to the harmful effects, the addition of gold nanoparticles to a modified version of a drug designed in the 1990s to combat HIV creates a compound that prevents the virus from gaining a cellular foothold. The drug, a compound known as TAK-779, was originally found to bind to a specific location on human T-cells, which blocks the HIV virus' entry to the body's immune system. Unfortunately, the portion of the drug's molecule that made binding possible had unpleasant side effects. When that portion of the molecule - an ammonium salt - was removed, the drug lost its binding ability.

The researchers turned to gold as the answer as the element is non-reactive in the human body and would be the perfect "scaffold" to attach molecules of the drug to in the absence of the ammonium salt, holding the drug molecules together and concentrating their effect. The idea is that by attaching these individual molecules of the drug with a weak binding ability to the gold nanoparticle, one can magnify their ability to bind. The researchers started with a modified version of TAK-779, which didn't include the harmful ammonium salt. After testing, they found that attaching 12 molecules of the modified drug (SDC-1721) to one nanoparticle of gold restored the drug's ability to prevent HIV infection in primary cultured patient cells. NCSU.