Using this technique, Smurthwaite and Zach Stolp, formerly an SDSU student and currently a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, tested 1,280 drug compounds to see whether any of them could block prM cleavage to yield a green tag, preventing a critical step in the dengue viral life cycle. (sciencedaily.com)
Connor says the approach can work with some stages of the viral life cycle but not with others, and experiments on a pseudotype will always have to be confirmed using the actual virus; sometimes the two organisms behave differently. (scientificamerican.com)
Current antiviral drugs target encoded proteins essential to the viral life cycle, and which vary so much among virus types that a specifically tailored drug seldom is effective against more than one of them. (scientificamerican.com)