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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

HIV, Vivo, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, AIDS

College

Life Sciences

Department

Microbiology and Molecular Biology

Abstract

Worldwide we have known about the Human Immunodeficiency Virus since the early 80’s, and since that time there has been research to find different “cures” for the disease that the virus causes called: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Since the epidemic has started nearly 30 million people have died from AIDS related causes, and there are nearly 34 million people worldwide that are HIV positive. One of the striking features of the virus that makes it so difficult to treat is its rapid ability to evolve. When looking at an HIV positive patient, statistically speaking, if you were to take every single virus in the body of the patient and look at the different nucleotides of the genome of the virus; you would see that there would be a mutation of one of every single nucleotide within the whole genome of the virus in at least one of all the viruses of the patient every single day. This is saying that since there are so many viruses, and they evolve, and mutate so quickly, that every single part of the virus is bound to evolve and mutate within the viruses in the body of the patient every single day. This creates a problem because when we develop a new drug that targets a part of the virus to inactivate the virus, there is a high probability that one of the viruses will mutate that specific part that is targeted by the drug, causing it to be drug resistant. This newly evolved drug resistant virus will then be able to replicate, and now the patient will have an even nastier, drug resistant virus in their system.

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