For how we live.
Bepirovirsen, cleared on 20 October, is the first antisense drug for chronic hepatitis B. In two trials about one in five carefully selected patients stayed virus-free off all treatment; none on placebo did.
Hovilpri (pritelivir), a helicase-primase inhibitor, was approved on 9 October for immunocompromised adults whose herpes lesions resist aciclovir. In its trial, 63% healed by day 28 against 34% on comparator therapy.
A Toronto cohort reports that an eight-day antiviral protocol prevented or cleared hepatitis C in all 116 recipients of organs from infected donors, with survival matching recipients of uninfected organs.
RESOLVE randomised 880 treatment-naive, non-cirrhotic patients to a shorter sofosbuvir–velpatasvir course; cure rates were non-inferior to the 12-week standard, with implications for the cost of elimination programmes.
The CENTERSTONE trial found a single dose lowered lab-confirmed spread to household contacts by about a third, but spread that made contacts ill was not significantly cut, and resistant virus emerged in some patients.
A Shionogi-funded randomised trial found that giving household contacts a five-day course dropped the rate of symptomatic Covid from 9.0% to 2.9%, with no severe cases in either group.
A bird-flu virus from British Columbia poultry carried the H275Y mutation that blunts Tamiflu and peramivir. In the lab it stayed vulnerable to zanamivir and baloxavir — and was less virulent in mice.
Cold sores heal on their own in about a week, and nothing clears the virus for good. Creams and pills shave hours to roughly a day off an episode — but only if started at the first tingle.
Taken as prescribed, oral PrEP cuts the risk of getting HIV from sex by about 99%, the CDC says. But randomised trials measured 44% to 86% — because the protection depends almost entirely on taking it.
The two most-prescribed respiratory antivirals sit at opposite ends of the evidence. One shortens flu by less than a day on average; the other cut serious outcomes sharply — but only in the group at real risk.
Xocova is taken after a known exposure, not after symptoms appear. In a 2,041-person trial it cut symptomatic infection by 67% through day 10.
In a controlled human infection trial, high-dose mosnodenvir suppressed DENV-3 far below placebo. Resistance-associated changes appeared in every sequenced recipient and none of the placebo group.