February 18, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
The world of biotech has benefited enormously from the advance of antivirals in recent years, and the entire scientific community is delighted by the possibilities now presented to extend life expectancy and cure disease, the chief medical officer of Chimerix told BioSpace Wednesday.
“Taking a step back and looking at the last five decades, we’ve gone from having no antivirals available, to now using antivirals to cure viral infections like HCV, suppress HIV, which have restored life expectancy in people with HIV, and now with brincidofovir, we may have the first broad spectrum antiviral with the potential to address a range of viruses for immunocompromised patients who have no alternative therapeutic options,” W. Garrett Nichols, a medical doctor and chief medical officer of Chimerix, told BioSpace.
“Traditionally, antiviral drugs have targeted a single virus, dismantling a specific part of a specific virus,” he said. Nichols said Chimerix is most excited about brincidofovir, which “works differently,” showing in vitro antiviral activity against many clinically relevant DNA viruses and raising the possibility for an antiviral with broad spectrum application that can prevent or treat multiple life-threatening viral infections which often co-exist in the same patient.
“Specifically over the last one to two years, we’ve seen from our own trials that we are now raising the awareness of and increasing monitoring for these potentially fatal viruses and we’re grappling with how many people are susceptible to them,” Nichols told BioSpace. “We didn’t look for adenovirus before because there was never anything available to treat it. So we are only now looking for a way to identify these infections earlier so we can intervene with prevention or earlier treatment.”
The horizon for anti-infective growth is both broad and full of possibilities--a landscape that has received a solid boost by the boom in the biotech sector. It’s all part of a renaissance in novel science that has many in biotech champing at the bit to get started on new experiments and treatments.
“We’re beginning to see a recognition that infectious diseases are one of the great threats of the next century, and we believe that biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are beginning to see the wisdom of investing in these areas,” said Nichols. “Fortunately, we have a long history in antiviral development, which gives us a head start in this area of critical public health need.”
BioSpace Temperature Poll
Will Job Cuts Continue? After a week that saw Quintiles, Sanofi and Actavis slashing almost a 1,000 biotech jobs, BioSpace wonders if the ax will continue to fall. Give us your thoughts about the sector’s “streamlining” below.
