Research Interest

Dr. Marchand research interests include the development of novel HIV-1 integrase inhibitors, the investigation of their mechanism of action and the exploration of the different steps of the integration reaction. The rational for developing HIV integrase inhibitors is that: (1) viruses with mutant integrase cannot replicate; (2) integrase is one of the three retroviral enzymes (with reverse transcriptase and protease) with no cellular equivalent; (3) raltegravir, elvitegravir and dolutegravir have recently been FDA-approved as integrase inhibitor for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Dr. Marchand’s goals are to discover new antiviral agents, to evaluate which steps of the integration reaction are affected by these drugs and to determine their binding site in the HIV-1 integrase-DNA complex. Dr. Marchand’shas reported and patented several families of antivirals available for development and licensing.