Abstract: The difficulty to eradicate the HIV-1, off-target effects together with the rapid emergence of multidrug-resistant strains have created an urgent need for more potent and less toxic therapies against other targets of HIV virus. From the point of view of medicinal chemistry, we summarizes and discusses current endeavours towards the discovery and development of novel inhibitors with various scaffolds or distinct mechanisms of action, and also provides examples illustrating new methodologies in medicinal chemistry that contribute to the identification of novel antiretroviral agents.