[ad_1]
The World Health Organization said in a statement that it believes “prevention is better than cure” and that “these drugs will not be an alternative to vaccines”. The Geneva-based organization has yet to make any official recommendations in favor of Paxlovid and said it would like to monitor for side effects.
“It will be very difficult to use Paxlovid on a large scale because people will have to be tested and treated very early on,” says Robert Shafer, M.D., professor of medicine at Stanford University. “It won’t have the same effect as vaccines and will be a very expensive solution in comparison.”
a different strategy
Maybe that’s why. But the pills are still an important addition to the anti-covid arsenal.
At the beginning of the epidemic, international organizations poured billions of dollars. vaccination schedules. They also prioritized “reusing” existing drugs, searching the pharmacy shelves for anything that might help. But designing a new, customized chemical drug didn’t get the same kind of public support. “It was as if the world had given up on new antivirals before they even started,” Annette von Delft, a researcher at the University of Oxford, wrote in Nature last year.
Von Delft is part of an organization called Covid Moonshot, which says it’s struggling to find funding for new antiviral pills. This is despite some great success with other antivirals, such as pills that keep HIV under control and, more recently, those that beat hepatitis C. The group says one reason for this is that health officials believe it would take too long to design a new chemical from scratch. .
It is true that such an effort involves inevitable cycles of trial and error. “You can’t just give the computer an enzyme and say, ‘Design me a drug for this.’ It can give you 100 ideas, but then you have to synthesize them,” says Stanford University researcher Michael Lin. It may take a few weeks for a single drug to be synthesized, and then you need to find out its key features, such as whether it is absorbed in the gut or broken down in the liver. All of this is done with real-life testing on animals.
What’s more, some major pharmaceutical companies have moved away from antiviral research in recent years. Despite the successes with HIV and hepatitis C, the list of viruses affecting rich countries – viruses that have no vaccine and for which a pill can make money – didn’t last long. Scholars like Icahn’s White, who specialize in flu medications, have seen career prospects drop. “People didn’t think there were more profitable viruses to treat,” says White. “There was a time when it was difficult to stay at work.”
However, it turns out that chemists know a few tricks that have proven invaluable against the covid virus.
[ad_2]
Source link