Biotech Values

[willyw]

I was very encouraged listening to the last ENTA pitch about a week ago.

I felt BOTH RSV and HBV programs looked promising.

ENTA already has a very good HBV antiviral to drop the viral load. They may add another anti-viral but they went to a different mechanism, which could (it remains to be seen) bolster their HBV arsenal.

In HCV (Hep C) the early program was interferon, then pegalated (increased trough levels to a weekly shot) interferon coupled with ribavirin.

What is ribavirin? It's a mutagen. HCV rapidly reproduced creating millions of copies per day, and with a lot of variations.
When they added the mutagen, it still reproduced, but the copies were flawed; many more were non-viable copies.
Before ribavirin and interferon pegalation HCV was practically incurable; those two improvements raised the cure rate to about 50% with a one year treatment (in G-1)

I'm inferring that the HBV RNA destabilizer could aid the anti-viral; thus increasing the net viral load decline.
The de-stabilizer alone may create it's own viral load decline, but my sense is that like ribavirin, it weakens/disrupts the virus and will work synergistically with the anti-viral.

I don't know if it will have the effect of touching the elusive latent aspect of the virus, but antivirals alone in the past have not been enough.

It makes sense for me to have a multi-pronged attack, and it may have some historical basis as it *may* (I am theorizing) have some similarities to early HCV successes.

Ribavirin was toxic in a number of ways (which I won't enumerate) but a "destabilizer" may work in a similar fashion, will likely be safer than riba, and may provide a new path to winning the HBV battle.

I have no predictions, but it looks very interesting to me. The fact that ENTA is coming out with this looks encouraging, as they are experts in this area...as we have seen more than a few times.
(disclaimer- I have no science training, I'm just a grunt layman, and I have only the scarcest info on the new program-I'm totally spitballing) : )