Update On Emerging Antivirals For The Management Of Herpes Simplex Virus Infections: A Patenting Perspective

Abstract

Herpes simplex virus (HSV) infections can be treated efficiently by the application of antiviral drugs. The herpes family of viruses is responsible for causing a wide variety of diseases in humans. The standard therapy for the management of such infections includes acyclovir (ACV) and penciclovir (PCV) with their respective prodrugs valaciclovir and famciclovir. Though effective, long term prophylaxis with the current drugs leads to development of drug-resistant viral isolates, particularly in immunocompromised patients. Moreover, some drugs are associated with dose-limiting toxicities which limit their further utility. Therefore, there is a need to develop new antiherpetic compounds with different mechanisms of action which will be safe and effective against emerging drug resistant viral isolates. Significant advances have been made towards the design and development of novel antiviral therapeutics during the last decade. As evident by their excellent antiviral activities, pharmaceutical companies are moving forward with several new compounds into various phases of clinical trials. This review provides an overview of structure and life cycle of HSV, progress in the development of new therapies, update on the advances in emerging therapeutics under clinical development and related recent patents for the treatment of Herpes simplex virus infections.

Advances in structure-assisted antiviral discovery for animal viral diseases

“…The genome is composed of two regions namely unique long region, UL and unique short region, US linked covalently to each other and flanked by three segments. HSV has three origins of replication (ori)-one copy of oriL and two copies of oriS (Vadlapudi et al, 2013).…”