Today, people infected with HIV can live normal, longer and healthy lives thanks to the different forms of treatment modes available today. One such form of treatment is antiretroviral therapy for HIV (Palella, FJ et al. Declining morbidity and mortality Among patients with advanced human immunodeficiency virus infection. N. Engl. J. Med. 338, 853–860 (1998 ). Antiretroviral drugs help manage HIV in infected people by preventing the process of duplication of the HIV virus. Various antiretroviral drugs are used in combination with each other to achieve maximum suppression of the HIV virus (Arts EJ, Hazuda DJ. Antiretroviral drug therapy for HIV-1. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine Between 1996 and 2010, life expectancy for patients starting ART increased by approximately 9 years for women and 10 years for men. men (Survival of HIV-positive patients starting antiretroviral treatment between 1996 and 2013: a collaborative study analysis). Trickey, Adam et al. to plagiarism Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Despite the availability of new treatments like ART to manage HIV, studies have shown that non-adherence to antiretroviral therapy by people infected with the HIV virus can significantly affect the positive outcomes of antiretroviral therapy (Mills, EJ et al. Adherence to antiretroviral therapy in sub-Saharan Africa and North America: a meta-analysis. JAMA 296, 679-690 (2006), and Lima, VD et al. of their compliance on mortality over time. J. Acquirer. Syndr. Factors such as high cost and low accessibility or availability of drugs, unforeseen personal situations, and societal acceptance of HIV-positive patients can lead to non-adherence to antiretroviral therapy. Patients are also known to adhere to their therapy schedule during the first few therapy sessions. As treatment progresses, patients become less adherent (Bangsberg, DR & Mills, EJ Long-term adherence to antiretroviral therapy in resource-limited settings: a bitter pill to swallow. Antivir. Ther. 18, 25–28 ( 2013). Chesney MA et al. (2000) report the Adult AIDS Clinical Trials Group (AACTG) adherence instruments to obtain medication adherence data. two rounds of questionnaires, each lasting approximately 10 minutes, involving 75 HIV-positive people on ART conducted at 10 AACTG sites in the United States. The study reported that “11% of patients reported. having missed at least one dose the day before the interview, and 17% reported having missed at least one dose in the previous two days. The most common reasons for forgetting medications included “simply forgot” (66). %) and a number of factors often associated with better health, including being busy (53%), away from home (57%) and changes in routine (51%). There is a need to develop a stable drug delivery system enabling long-term, consistent and timely delivery of antiretroviral drugs to HIV patients (Fasano, A. Innovative strategies for oral drug and peptide delivery. Trends Biotechnology. 16, 152-157 (1998).medication would significantly alleviate the stress felt by patients following a daily medication schedule by reducing the chances of patients forgetting to consume their prescribed antiretroviral medications and requiring patients to keep track of their medication consumption (Mobula L., Barnhart M, Malati C, Rakhmanina N, Minior T, et al. (2015) Long-acting injectable antiretroviral therapy for the management of HIV infection: an update on a potential game-changer from J AIDS Clin Res 6: 466. doi:10.4172/2155-6113.1000466). An oral antiretroviral drug delivery system, although effective and widely used, cannot tolerate the low pH of stomach acids for long periods of time (Mojaverian, P. Assessment of Gastrointestinal pH and Gastric Residence Time via the Heidelberg radiotelemetry capsule: pharmaceutical application. Drug Res. AR Kirtane et al (2018). a pig This “modular drug delivery system that folds and retracts, allowing oral dosing, maintains its integrity in the stomach for an extended stay and can be loaded with up to six different drug formulations resulting in the desired pharmacokinetics” and “is capable of delivering three highly potent antiretrovirals – dolutegravir (DTG), cabotegravir (CAB) and rilpivirine (RPV) – for a week after a single dose in a porcine model. » The antiretroviral drug delivery system studied in AR Kirtane et al. (2018) is a model in early form. This model has “six arms”, capable of delivering six different drugs at desired flow rates, connected by a “central core” (Fig. 1a). The six arms of this model, connected to the core, fold on top of each other. This system is then enclosed in a shell to form an orally ingestible capsule. Once the capsule comes into contact with stomach acids, the shell disintegrates and the six arms unfold into a star shape and begin releasing the drug loaded onto each arm. The materials used to construct the model's arms had to have "rigidity for gastric stay and adjustability for drug release." AR Kirtane et al. (2018) reports using various “mechanical tests” whose results yielded “an Elastollan®R6000 thermoplastic polyurethane” that “exhibited ultimate bending stress.” Early drug models consisted of a single type of polymer making up the central core as well as the arms of the model. Thus, this polymer was responsible for providing rigidity to the structure as well as delivering drugs. This became a problem when designing a model capable of releasing drugs at varying rates, because the rigidity of the model was compromised when the polymer configuration was changed (a new drug capsule could enable weekly treatment against the HIV Replacing daily pills with a weekly regimen could help patients stick to their dosing regimen, Anne Trafton, MIT News Office, January 9, 2018 http://news.mit.edu/2018/new-drug-. capsule-may-allow-weekly-hiv-treatment-0109). AR Kirtane et al. (2018) report using “tensile testing” methods to select polymers for constructing central cores. “A thermoplastic polyurethane Elastollan®1185” was selected because it had an “elastic modulus of approximately 27.7 ± 2.2 MPa.” Ultimately, the structural polymer Elastollan®R6000 and the elastomeric core polymer Elastollan®1185 were selected for model construction because they demonstrated "the highest value..