Biotech Values

[horrible]

I've used BVDV as a surrogate for HCV in the past. It's usually used in early stage cell culture screening. The 2 viruses are related. A good comparison would be HIV/SIV or vaccinia/smallpox. They are related enough that a hit against BVDV is likely a hit against HCV (similar enzyme biochemistry and structure).

BVDV has several benefits. It's very easy to grow in culture. It's cheaper/simpler than a replicon system. And, it's not pathogenic to humans so it is easy (and cheap) to work with.

In my experience, very early screening would be done w/ BVDV, then early prospects would move to a replicon system. After narrowing down your leads to a manageable number (2-4 compounds?), you would then move to animal models (woodchuck hepatitis virus, primates much later).



>surrogate virus, bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV).<

It may serve as a surrogate in the sense that if the vaccine doesn't work in that setting, culling the herd is the standard of care.

http://producer.wisdairy.com/dairyresources/userfiles/bvdv.htm

In other words, they may use that as a surrogate for the same reason they don't expose humans to anthrax when testing the efficacy of potential anthrax vaccines.

That and there is a separate market for BVDV vaccines...