Anti-Retroviral Drugs | Mechanism | Mnemonic and Tricks

Hello medicos, this blog is about Anti-Retroviral Drugs. After reading this you will be knowing basic mechanism of drugs; and mnemonics and tricks to remember the full classification.

I.                    Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase inhibitors (i.e. NRTIs):

Mechanism: Active forms of Nucleosides gets incorporated into the growing viral DNA and cause premature chain termination.

Examples are:

-          Zidovudine
-          Didanozine

-          Stavudine

-          Lamivudine

-          Abacavir

(These are very commonly used names, so I don’t want to burden your brain by providing a mnemonic for this).

II.                  Non-Nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (i.e. NNRTIs):

Mechanism: These drugs directly binds to the Reverse Transcriptase enzyme causing inhibition of its function.

Mnemonic for the name of these drugs is NEERD. So, why NERD? Because they are NOT with NRTIs. They are NNRTIs.

The drugs are:

-          Nevirapine

-          Efavirenz

-          Etravirine

-          Rilpivirine

-          Delaviridine

III.                Next is Nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors (i.e. nRTI):

Only one drug to remember, which is Tenofovir.

You can remember it is a nucleoTide RT inhibitor, so it starts from T.

And we are using small or tiny ’n’ as a short form (nRTI).

From Tiny, you can remember Teno. That’s simple.

IV.                Fusion inhibitor:

As the name suggests, these drugs block the initial fusion of HIV with cell surface receptors. Basically, they bind to gp41 transmembrane protein.

Only one drug you need to remember in this category is Enfuvirtide.

As you can see it contains “FU” in the spelling. So Fusion Inhibitor can be remembered as "FU" containing drug, Enfuviritide.

V.                  CCR5 receptor blocker:

Drugs in this category bind to the host cells through CCR5 receptors, preventing interaction with gp41.

The drug's name is Maraviroc.

(this drug contains ROC in its name, so you can remember it as ROCK on CCR5 receptor i.e. Maraviroc)

VI.                Protease inhibitors:

All the drugs in this category contain the word “navir”

Examples are:

-          Indinavir,

-          Ritonavir,

-          Darunavir, and so on…

You can remember these three examples if you are familiar with Hindi, all 3 contain the name of food items or drink like A(I)nde, Roti and Daru.

VII.              Integrase inhibitors:

These drugs inhibit the action of integrase which is required for the insertion of the viral genome into the DNA of the host cell.

Examples are:

-          Raltegravir

-          Elvitegravir

-          Dolutegravir

All these drugs have the word “gravir” in their name.

You can remember these drugs by Mnemonic: RED Gravis.

So, this is the summary of the whole classification we have studied.

I hope this tricks and mnemonics helped you to remember Anti-retroviral drugs, which is very difficult to remember.

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