Yesterday I wrote about the potential dangers the antiviral drug molnupiravir could unleash by supercharging new SARS-CoV-2 variants. In that respect, our prior experience with another antiviral drug, favipiravir, may be of interest. Like molnupiravir, favipiravir works by creating enough copying errors during replication to essentially kill off the virus. The study on mutagenicity of the molnupiravir metabolite in the Journal of Infectious Diseases earlier this year also tested favipirivir. The left side of the panel shows the genotixicity of molnupiravir metabolite, NHC, in ... [+] hamster cells at increasing concentrations and compared to UV light and the control vehicle.

Source: Forbes November 03, 2021 00:32 UTC