Anti-rabies drug scheduled for animal testing
US-based NanoViricide's latest drug, RabiCide-I, an anti-rabies drug, is scheduled to begin preclinical animal testing in Vietnam by early 2007.
US-based NanoViricide's latest drug, RabiCide-I, an anti-rabies drug, is scheduled to begin preclinical animal testing in Vietnam by early 2007.
Rabies kills over 50,000 people per year in the sub-tropical regions of Asia, India and Africa. The new drug was developed at the request of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology of the Ministry of Health, Government of Vietnam.
According to Eugene Seymour, ceo of NanoViricides, 'The World Health Organization reports that more than 10 million people receive post-exposure vaccination against this disease. Thus the size of the potential market for our drug is larger than anyone at first suspected. The timing is quite fortuitous since the Chinese government has destroyed 50,000 dogs and may kill as many as 500,000 more in an effort to stop this evolving rabies epidemic in the Yunnan Province.'
'It has taken us a very short time to design and develop a drug against rabies', said Anil Diwan, company president. 'This is because we simply had to swap the ligand that encodes the address of the virus to the core nanomaterial that is the viricide's engine.'