Question

Why is AIDS treatment often done with a cocktail of drugs?

Answer 1

The treatment of acquired immune deficiency syndrome is often done with one or more antiretroviral drugs of different groups, for example, a protease inhibitor plus a reverse transcriptase inhibitor, in an attempt to approach two or more stages of the HIV life cycle at once. Besides that, the high mutation rate of the virus may make the treatment ineffective and for this reason, the use of the drug cocktail allows physicians to choose other different drug combinations to get around viral resistance.