Zidovudine or AZT

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Zidovudine (INN) or azidothymidine (AZT) (also called ZDV) is a nucleoside analog reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI), a type of antiretroviral drug. It was the first approved treatment for HIV. It is also sold under the names Retrovir and Retrovis, and as an ingredient in Combivir and Trizivir. It is an analog of thymidine.

AZT use was a major breakthrough in AIDS therapy in the 1990s that significantly altered the course of the illness and helped destroy the notion of the 1980s and early 90s that HIV/AIDS was an instant death sentence.

Zidovudine was the first drug approved for the treatment of AIDS and HIV infection. Jerome Horwitz of Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute and Wayne State University School of Medicine first synthesized AZT in 1964[1][2], under a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant. AZT was originally intended as an anticancer drug, but was shelved after it proved insufficiently effective against tumors in mice.[3]

In 1974 W. Ostertag from the Max Planck Institute in Germany provided some evidence that AZT was active in a mouse retrovirus culture system.
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The time between the first demonstration that AZT was active against HIV in the laboratory and its approval was only 25 months, which is one of the shortest periods of drug development in recent history.