Biophysical and structural studies on the capsid protein of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1: a new drug target?

New therapeutic agents are necessary against HIV due to the rapid emergence of drug-resistant variants of the virus, which has yielded therapeutic strategies partially ineffective. Assembly can be considered as a good target for antivirals since it depends only on repetitive weak protein-protein interactions, and probably disruption of a small part of these interactions is sufficient to suppress infectivity in a dominant-negative effect. We propose the capsid protein of HIV-1 as a potential candidate.