Successful ribozyme-mediated gene therapy for HIV infection has to take into account several factors:
| 1. | The therapeutic gene must interfere with or shut down the expression of essential viral genes. |
| 2. | This requires a vector system for gene delivery and expression in HIV-sensitive cells. |
| 3. | To bypass the high genetic variability of the HIV-1 replication process, the target sequence should be chosen in highly conserved sequences of HIV-1. These fortunately are mostly present in the essential regulatory genes (tat, rev) or sequences (PBS, U5), which are required to produce infectious viral particles (1 ). |
