Research Article
Kabir OO, Abdulfatai TA and
Abstract
The search for effective drugs to treat HIV/AIDS has been the major task of most researchers since several years of its discovery. Most synthetic drugs such as Efavirenz, Tenofovir, Emtricibatine among others are employed in the antiretroviral treatment which have dangerous effects on patients. Thus, herbal medicine can be used as an alternative source of treatment for HIV positive patients as they exhibit little or no side effects when compared to synthetic drugs. This research work sought to examine whether plant diterpene lactones isolated from Andrographis paniculata exhibit anti-HIV activity using molecular docking studies. The HIV-1 env gp120 was docked by two diterpene lactones namely; andrographolide and neoandrographolide using docking tool (igemdock v2.1) after retrieving protein structure from Protein Data Bank (PDB). The result indicates that neoandrographolide is a more promising drug against HIV-1 than andrographolide due to its low interaction energy for the formation of ligand-receptor complex.