Antiretroviral Therapy

Antiretroviral therapy suppresses replication of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, turning what was once a near-uniformly fatal diagnosis into a manageable chronic condition. Zidovudine, known as AZT, received expedited approval as the first antiretroviral drug in 1987, but used alone it produced only a temporary benefit before the virus developed resistance and patients still inevitably died. The treatment did not become durably effective until 1996, when two studies presented at the International AIDS Conference in Vancouver showed that combining two older drugs with a new class, protease inhibitors, suppressed the virus long-term; this three-drug approach, called highly active antiretroviral therapy, produced a sixty to eighty percent decline in AIDS deaths and hospitalizations and cut new United States AIDS cases by nearly half within a year. This atlas describes the history of the treatment and is not medical advice.