New Drug Effective Against Bird Flu
Drug researcher reports that a new peptide fragment shows activity against influenza A including the H5N1 avian flu in vitro. The fragment is only 20 amino acid residues
New drug provides effective defence against bird flu
The above headline is misleading since the work has only been done in vitro and not in patients. I don’t have access to the actual article so I can’t comment on the amino acid sequence.
The peptide seems to prevent viruses from entering the cell and the survival rate for the animal models was 100%. While this is promising, there have been many cases of drugs showing excellent activity in animal models but never working in humans. It will be interesting to see if this develops and goes beyond the preclinical stage. Since this work comes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it would take a deal with a pharmaceutical or biotech company before it moves to the next stage.
Sources
Technorati Tags: avian flu, bird flu, antiviral, virology
Related Posts:
Bookmark it with:
| 
del.icio.us
| 
Digg it
| 
Furl
| 
Simpy
| 
Spurl
| 
My Yahoo!
|
