Oral antivirals hold promise for staving off serious illness, but supplies remain limited.
“At some point we would love this drug to be something like Tamiflu, where you can go to any pharmacy to receive it.”On January 18, Pfizer reported the results of the three laboratory experiments, which haven’t yet undergone peer-review. In the first experiment, researchers found that the drug’s key ingredient, nirmatrelvir, was equally successful at blocking protease from Omicron and the original virus strain.
These preliminary results are encouraging but not particularly surprising, Ison says, given the antiviral doesn’t target the spike-shaped protein on the surface of the virus like monoclonal antibodies do. This can give antiviral pills an upper hand over antibody treatments, since the Omicron variant has a large number of mutations that make the.
Duke describes the new findings as reassuring. “It’s great to see the actual data,” she says. “Based on the mechanism of the antivirals I would expect it to work against Omicron and also future variants.” By contrast, many of the more widely used antibody treatments, which do target the spike protein, are markedly less effective against Omicron than previous variants. The Food and Drug Administration recentlyby Regeneron and Eli Lilly. “The antivirals target parts of the viral machinery that are so much more core to what the virus does,” Duke says. “It would be surprising if there were a lot of mutations in that part of the virus.
. Researchers found that molnupiravir, remdesivir, and an antiviral Pfizer developed that’s similar to Paxlovid but given intravenously all
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