“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. From George Santayana, The life of Reason, 1905.
“And at high cost for society I may add”. From Martin Schutten, CSO, IQ-IDM, 2023
Below is a list of compounds that have been trialled for treatment of RSV up to phase 2/3, but that latterly failed due to insufficient evidence of clinical efficacy. Some of these drugs were successfully tested in human challenge trials (five in fact), so designed as to provide strong data on the ability of such compounds to inhibit replication of the virus in infected individuals. Yet despite the ability to do so each failed to demonstrate efficacy against clinical symptoms of RSV disease in patients admitted to hospital or consulting a GP.
PC786 RNA polymerase inhibitor
ALS-8167 RNA polymerase inhibitor
Presatovir Fusion inhibitor
MDT-637 Fusion inhibitor
Rilematovir Fusion inhibitor
RSV604 Nucleocapsid
EDP-938 NP inhibitor
ALN-RSV01 RNAi
There is a common link between all these compounds, in that they are all direct inhibitors of virus replication only and have no direct effects on critical symptoms nor on any of the triggers that maintain the pathophysiological cascades initiated by the virus.
In RSV disease, young babies are typically admitted to hospital or consult their GP when symptoms are peaking, with their lungs already starting to fill up with fluids and inflammatory debris. Immune-responses during this period may cause irreparable damage to the respiratory epithelium; frequently resulting in long-term illnesses, like wheezing and asthma. Blocking or interrupting the event (viral infection and replication) that initiated such cyclical cascades is clearly not an effective solution (see list above).
At IQ-IDM we feel it is time for a new approach, linking the prognostic capabilities of ‘test-tube virology’ and translational immunology to a profound understanding of the physiology of the human body, and especially of the respiratory tract. IQ-IDM works to leverage in-depth knowledge in these specialist areas, with many decades of experience at the patients bed-side and in Big Pharma industry. With this we intend to give a credible alternative to the current technological determinism of high-throughput test-tube compound screening and big-data analyses resulting in and represented by the list above.
We believe it is time for a change: time for truly effective solutions aimed at interfering with the pathophysiological processes of the disease and thus to better clinical outcomes.
