RT Book, Section
A1 Schleiss, Mark R.
A2 Kline, Mark W.
SR Print(0)
ID 1182934995
T1 Antiviral Therapy
T2 Rudolph's Pediatrics, 23e
YR 2018
FD 2018
PB McGraw-Hill Education
PP New York, NY
SN 9781259588594
LK accesspediatrics.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1182934995
RD 2024/04/19
AB The  deployment  of  antiviral  therapy  typically  requires  the  clinician  to  strike  a  delicate  balance  between  targeting  virally  encoded  functions  required  for  production  of  progeny  viruses  and  avoiding  toxicity  to  the  host  cellular  functions  subverted  by  the  viral  replication  machinery.  Accordingly,  as  a  part  of  the  trade-off  for  eliciting  antiviral  effect,  many  antivirals  historically  have  induced  considerable  toxicity  in  the  host  cell  as  well.  A  watershed  moment  in  the  history  of  antiviral  drug  discovery  was  the  development  of  the  drug  acyclovir,  one  of  a  series  of  drugs  that  was  developed  that  blocked  nucleic  acid  synthesis  only  in  virally  infected  cells  without  damaging  the  uninfected  host  cells  (because  a  viral  enzyme,  thymidine  kinase,  is  required  to  phosphorylate  the  compound  to  its  active  form).  This  discovery  resulted  in  the  awarding  of  a  Nobel  Prize  to  Dr.  Gertrude  Elion  in  1988.