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What to Start Treatment With?
Part of HIV Medications: When to Start and What to Take

November 2006

There are now many U.S. government-approved HIV medications. However, none of these medications can cure HIV, and no single drug taken alone is effective. But when several medications (usually three) are taken in combination, they can control the quantity of virus in your body and maintain the health of your immune system. This combination is called Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy, or HAART.

HIV medications fall into five types or "classes":

  • NRTIs (nucleoside or nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors)
  • NNRTIs (non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors)
  • PIs (protease inhibitors)
  • Entry inhibitors
  • Integrase inhibitors

All five classes of medications have been designed to interfere with HIV's ability to copy itself -- that is, to reproduce inside your body. Each class of medication stops the virus at a different moment in its reproductive cycle.


Think of HIV as a breeding factory set up inside a T cell. All it wants to do is grow inside of you and make duplicates of itself.

  • NRTIs act like broken building blocks so that the factory HIV tries to build in your T cells is made with broken bricks.

  • NNRTIs act like bad supervisors who give the wrong instructions to HIV during the building process.

  • Protease inhibitors act like workers who put defective parts in each new virus being built on the factory's assembly line.

  • Fusion inhibitors act like locks on the factory door that prevent HIV from getting inside.

Analogy courtesy of the British Columbia Persons With AIDS Society.

Copyright © 2006 Body Health Resources Foundation. All rights reserved.

This article was provided by The Body. It is a part of the publication HIV Medications: When to Start and What to Take -- A Roadmap to Success.


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