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Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a major health problem in many parts of the world. The human immunodeficiency virus-1 integrase (HIV-1 IN) enzyme has been targeted in HIV patients for therapy. Several integrase inhibitors have been reported, but only elvitegravir (EVG), a new-generation drug, is clinically approved for HIV treatment. In the present work, we investigated two structural analogs of EVG as potential inhibitors of the target molecule, HIV-1 IN. The ligand binding site on HIV-1 IN was identified using Q-SiteFinder, and the HIV-1 IN protein was docked with ligand (EVG and/or analogs) using AutoDock 4. The results suggest that Lys173, Thr125, and His171 are involved in enzyme-substrate binding through hydrogen bonds. Single mutations carried out at Lys173, viz. Lys173Leu (polar > nonpolar) and Lys173Gln (polar > polar), in chain B using PyMOL showed the mutants to have lower binding energy when docked with analog 2, suggesting it to be more stable than analog 1. In conclusion, the mutant HIV-1 IN can bind EVG and its analogs. The physicochemical and pharmacokinetic parameters also show analog 2 to be a promising molecule that can be developed as an alternative to EVG to help overcome the problem of drug resistance by HIV to this inhibitor. Analog 2 may be used as an HIV-1 IN inhibitor with similar potential to that of EVG. Further validation through wet-lab studies, however, is required for future applications.

A fundamental issue related to therapy of HIV-1 infection is the emergence of viral mutations which severely limits the long term efficiency of the HIV-protease (HIV-PR) inhibitors. Development of new drugs is therefore continuously needed. Chemoinformatics enables to design and discover novel molecules analogous to established drugs using computational tools and databases. Saquinavir, an anti-HIV Protease drug is administered for HIV therapy. In this work chemoinformatics tools were used to design structural analogs of Saquinavir as ligand and molecular dockings at AutoDock were performed to identify potential HIV-PR inhibitors. The analogs S1 and S2 when docked with HIV-PR had binding energies of -4.08 and -3.07 kcal/mol respectively which were similar to that for Saquinavir. The molecular docking studies revealed that the changes at N2 of Saquinavir to obtain newly designed analogs S1 (having N2 benzoyl group at N1) and S2 (having 3-oxo-3phenyl propanyl group at N2) were able to dock with HIV-PR with similar affinity as that of Saquinavir. Docking studies and computationally derived pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties׳ comparisons at ACD/I-lab establish that analog S2 has more potential to evade the problem of drug resistance mutation against HIV-1 PR subtype-A. S2 can be further developed and tested clinically as a real alternative drug for HIV-1 PR across the clades in future.

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