How Evolutionary Biology Can Help Design Novel Anti-Viral Drugs

While the concept of evolutionary medicine has been around for well over fifty years, the collaboration between evolutionary biology and medical research has proven less profitable than was predicted by early proponents of the field. However, recent efforts to fight rapidly evolving infectious viral pathogens have been increasingly relying on the underlying understanding of viral evolution in order to design more effective antiviral drugs. Esteban Domingo and his colleagues in a recent perspective for Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy entitled "Future prospects for the treatment of rapidly evolving viral pathogens: insights from evolutionary biology" review the promise of drug design informed by evolutionary biology for overcoming viral escape mutations.

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What is the goal of virtual screening?

In a recent paper entitled "What has virtual screening ever done for drug discovery?", editorial board member David Clark discusses virtual screening achievements based on hits that made their way to the clinic. No less than seven very polarized sets of peer review comments proved the approach controversial, and one can bet that the question whether virtual screening aims at identifying preclinical hits or clinical candidates will continue to be debated among readers, as the article entered the top 20 most downloaded papers across the Expert Opinion series in August.

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New Hope for Old Chemotherapy?

While the vast majority of cancer research focuses on new therapeutic approaches, recent research on an unrelated topic has revealed new potential for old chemotherapy techniques. Anti-aging research by Valter Longo and colleagues at the University of Southern California chanced upon the idea while studying the effects differential stress resistance brought on by fasting. The groundbreaking study, published recently by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that fasting before chemotherapy has the potential to protect healthy cells from the deleterious effects of broad-spectrum chemotherapy, while cancer cells remain susceptible. Expert Opinion author Antonio Russo has reviewed this research and the potential for further development of this concept in a recent article in Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets.

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