EU researchers discover virus inhibitors
They could hasten the development of effective drugs
A European Union (EU) research project will end this month (March), having discovered inhibitors for viruses, which could hasten the development of effective drugs.
The EU-funded €21.8m SILVER project (the EU contributed €12m) was launched in October 2010. Its commercial participants include the UK’s Global Phasing (GPhL); Switzerland’s Pike Pharma; and Germany’s Riboxx. They, and research institutes from Belgium, UK, China, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain and Taiwan, have screened for inhibitors for viruses such as human enteroviruses, respiratory viruses, rabies, West Nile encephalitis, dengue haemorrhagic fever and the SARS and MERS coronaviruses.
Source material has included thousands of molecules, compounds and proprietary drugs, said a European Commission note. It claimed such basic research had been 'been largely neglected by the pharmaceutical industry…'. The result has been the discovery of compounds that selectively inhibit the replication of one or more viruses. The most promising inhibitors were optimised by chemical modification, with proof of concept studies performed in vivo. Also, the project created assays to facilitate identification of novel inhibitors at low bio-containment levels.
The project consortium is now negotiating with pharmaceutical companies to test a class of compounds and data packages that includes at least three inhibitors, said the Commission.