Coreceptor KAPOW!

Successful drug hunters are an elite group within the pharmaceutical industry, particularly given the difficulty of discovering and developing medicines. What distinguishes those who do find drugs that work from those who do not is not easily defined. Here, we track one success through a decade of exhaustive and highly innovative work by a young group of researchers at Pfizer Sandwich Laboratories in the United Kingdom. They discovered and developed maraviroc, a vital addition to the armory of HIV drugs.

Back in 1996, a series of reports published in quick succession in Nature,1,2 Cell,3 and Science,4 kick-started a race to develop a new class of HIV drug acting via a novel mechanism. These studies solved a mystery that had intrigued doctors working on the frontline of the HIV-1 epidemic - why certain Caucasian individuals with repeated exposure to the virus appeared to be immune to infection.

The answer lay in ...