Another antiviral drug, called zanamivir or Relenza, made by GlaxoSmithKline, is also effective against swine flu.
The fund's first investment was in BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, which needed additional funding to pursue clinical trials for its antiviral drug candidate Peramivir.
But that number can be reduced drastically to around 20% by giving infected pregnant women a short course of an antiviral drug just before they give birth.
Experts at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases heard how the 'H1N1pdm09' swine flu virus is still sensitive to another antiviral drug Relenza (zanamivir).
Thirty-one percent of telaprevir patients who had gotten no benefit at all from previous treatments with the current hepatitis C regimen, a combination of interferon and antiviral drug ribavirin, had SVRs.
The fund's first investment was in BioCryst Pharmaceuticals (nasdaq: BCRX - news - people ), which needed additional funding to pursue clinical trials for its antiviral drug candidate Peramivir.
Its main product will be an antiviral drug called ribavirin, which is being marketed by Schering-Plough (nyse: SGP - news - people) as part of a combination therapy for hepatitis C.
But even with shorter regimens, both drugs will still have to be given with interferon alpha, the two-decade old antiviral drug made by Merck and Roche that causes nasty flu like side-effects, including fever and fatigue.
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In separate experiments, the two flavonoids were added to lung-cell cultures before, during and after infection with H5N1, and tested on H5N1-infected cells treated with zanamivir (brand name Relenza), an antiviral drug prescribed to flu patients.
The U.S. has also committed to giving Mexico 400, 000 doses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, a shipment believed to have arrived Friday morning, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, interim deputy director for science and public health at the CDC.
Dr Magiorkinis, who did the work in collaboration with the University of Athens and Imperial College London, said the model had helped build a "solid argument" to improve early diagnosis and antiviral treatment in drug users.
Giacino is leading a federally funded five-year, 180-patient study of an antiviral and Parkinson's disease drug called amantadine in minimally conscious and vegetative patients.
The firm said it expected to triple its capacity of its antiviral Relenza to 195 million doses of the drug as it continued ongoing talks with up to 50 countries to supply products to cope with the H1N1 virus.
When Epiphany Biosciences, a tiny San Francisco drug developer, was looking for a hepatitis C antiviral compound to test in the lab, it could have saved a few thousand bucks by hiring test tube drones from India.
More recently he had run antiviral research at Bristol-Myers, helping produce the second-ever HIV drug (Videx, in 1991), and the HIV drug Zerit.
Wall Street is bracing for one of the biggest new drug categories in a decade: the launch of a series of antiviral medicines that could dramatically improve the cure rate for hepatitis C, a viral disease that slowly attacks the liver and is often fatal.
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