OBJECTIVES Recent decades have witnessed the development of highly innovative new antiviral drug therapies. However, there are concerns that rising costs and lengthening development times could have implications for future patient access to innovative new drugs. We sought to establish whether the time taken for the clinical development of new antiviral drugs launched in the UK had increased sin...

Chronic hepatitis B remains a treatment challenge despite the availability of new nucleoside analogs. This is due to the persistence of viral infection during therapy, which exposes the patient to the risk of developing antiviral drug resistance. Therefore, new polymerase inhibitors are needed to manage resistance to existing drugs and new trials of combination therapy are required to delay dru...

Rapid increase in drug-resistant influenza virus isolates, and pandemic threat posed by highly pathogenic avian influenza A and swine flu viruses provide clear and compelling reasons for fast tracking development of novel antiviral drugs. Nucleic acid-based drugs represent a promising class of novel antiviral agents that can be designed to target various seasonal, pandemic and avian influenza v...

Can the UK vaccine taskforce’s success in delivering safe and effective covid vaccines be repeated with new antiviral drugs? Elisabeth Mahase looks at research pipeline

Background: Acyclovir (9-(2-hydroxyethoxymethyl) guanine) (ACV) is an acyclic nucleoside analogue that has shown a potent antiviral activity, and it is known to inhibit the replication of herpesviruses including herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and type 2 (HSV-2), varicella- zoster virus (VZV), and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in cell cultures and in animals. ACV is khown to be toxic to gonads,t...

Antiviral drugs continue to be an important option for the treatment of influenza disease and will likely be the only option during the early phases of pandemic. However, the limited number of drug classes licensed for treatment of influenza raises several issues, particularly in the face of drug resistance. Two classes of drugs are presently licensed for treatment of influenza, M2 and neuramin...

After the recent summary of World Health Organization-authorized research on smallpox, several clinical issues remain. This policy review addresses whether early hemorrhagic smallpox is disseminated intravascular coagulation and speculates about the cause of the high mortality rate among pregnant women and whether ocular smallpox is partly the result of trachoma or vitamin A deficiency. The joi...

Though already marketed antiviral drugs are used in the research to treat SARS CoV2 infection, FDA approved drug and vaccine is still under different phases of clinical trials.