Prodrugs of HIV protease inhibitors

Despite the efficiency of the present polytherapies against AIDS, HIV replication continues indicating difficulties in drug adherence, drug-drug interactions, resistance issues, and the existence of reservoirs or sanctuaries for the virus. Moreover, most of the current FDA-approved HIV protease inhibitors (PIs) display disadvantageous physicochemical and pharmacological properties such as low water solubility, low oral bioavailability and/or low level of penetration into the HIV sanctuaries resulting from their in vivo binding to the plasma proteins and to the Multi-Drug-Resistant P-glycoprotein, their rapid metabolization and inactivation by the liver cytochrome P450 enzymes. To overcome these suboptimal pharmacokinetics, high daily doses must be ingested, which complicate patient adherence to the prescribed regimen and contribute to the appearance of serious long-term metabolic complications and to the decrease of the viral treatment outcome. Another attractive alternative aimed at improving the safety, pharmacokinetics, and therapeutic potency of the current PIs is to modify these PIs into pharmacologically inactive prodrugs which are converted in vivo into their parent active drug. The present review is dedicated to the different prodrug approaches, including the "lipophilic", "hydrophilic", "active transport" and "double-drug" prodrug strategies, which have been applied more particularly to the current HIV PIs used in clinic. Among the strategies explored up to now, the most successful one was the "hydrophilic" prodrug approach which has led to the discovery of fosamprenavir, a phosphate ester prodrug of amprenavir, which has reached phase III clinical trials. This success gives strong support for the search of PI prodrugs as a therapeutic alternative in addition to the development of new and well-tolerated PIs.