Antiviral Drugs

Antiviral drugs

Antiviral drugs are a class of medication which are prescribed to fight against flu in the body. Unlike most antibiotics, antiviral drugs do not destroy their target pathogens; instead, they manage their enhancement.

Most antivirals are considered relatively nontoxic to the host, and therefore can be used to treat illness. They should be imposing from viricides, which are not medication but destroy virus particles, either internally or externally.

The antiviral drugs currently available are designed to support deal mostly with HIV, herpes viruses, the hepatitis B and C viruses, and influenza A and B viruses.

Designing safe and useful antiviral drugs is difficult because viruses use the host's cells to replicate. This makes it complicated to find targets for the drug that would interfere with the virus without harming the host organism’s cells.

The first testing antivirals were developed in the 1960s, mostly to deal with herpes viruses, and were found using stuffy trial-and-error drug discovery methods.

Scientists grew cultures of cells and infected them with the target virus. They then present into the cultures chemicals which they thought might inhibit viral activity and observed whether the level of virus in the cultures rose or fell.