this sounds promising

[aineotter]

MIT researchers have come up with a sweet-sounding antiviral that couples double-stranded RNA detection with caspase activation. In laymans terms, this means that if double stranded RNA, which is produced by replication viruses, and not by normal cells, is present in a cell then the 'death switch' is flipped, and the cell self-destructs and

Comments

[djinnthespazz]

Let's see if Big Pharma tries to block this one. It'll be interesting to watch how they act/react.

[aineotter]

My guess is that they'll be jockeying to buy the patent. A big part of the R&D is done, and it looks promising. Pharm companies go through thousands of candidate drugs for each one that makes it to market, and this one is in animal trials already (though that's still a long way from market).

[cheez_ball]

Explained in today's XKCD: http://xkcd.com/938/

Big Pharma is probably going to wait on this one. The adenovirus clinical trial death is still on people's minds: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/286/5448/2244.short Never mind the lawsuits that resulted from it. The NEJM and other article had a grand total of 3 patients. No telling what will happen on scale-up.

I'm hoping for the best. But always cautious when seeing this kind of stuff.

[aineotter]

Well, yes. It may fail to pan out, but it is a really cool idea. All we have for toxicity testing as fast as I've heard is ' it didn't make the mice sick'. But it is a drug, rather than a viral gene therapy vector (which folks are much more wary of, with reason). And its hard not to get excited about the prospect of a broad spectrum antiviral, especially one with such a cool mechanism.