
Stanford scientists use abandoned drug to fight off viruses in a lab dish - fourstar
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2016/march/antiviral-drug-insights-032816.html
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gus_massa
I don't mind that this looks like a translation to Simple English like in the
xkcd book, but I find annoying that they never put the name of the drug. For
the curious: GSK983

The technique to select the drug they have to mix to reduce the toxicity is
very interesting.

The GSK983 drug inhibits one enzymes to produce pyrimidines (the bases C, T
and U of the ADN/ARN). But providing deoxycytidine (the base C) reduce the
toxicity for human cells.

All the virus they name are RNA-virus, so I guess this only work for this kind
of virus, and it's coherent with what I understand of the abstract of the
article. (this exclude foe example herpes, chickenpox, smallpox, ...)

Link to the abstract of the article:
[http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...](http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchembio.2050.html)

