There is currently no medicinal solution for bird flu in the world * the existing medicines are not effective against the disease
An Israeli company is developing a drug against bird flu. The drug is expected to be released on the market in about a year and a half. "Although it has dropped from the headlines, bird flu continues to spread. And what's more - recently there was a report from Malaysia about the definite transmission of the disease from person to person and not only through poultry, as was the case in the past," says Zion Blas, CEO of Matrix Pharma, which develops the drug. "This means that the mutation we were afraid of already exists, and it is only a matter of time until the disease becomes a worldwide health problem." According to Blas, the medicine will be ready in less than a year and in about a year and a half it will be possible to purchase the medicine.
The mortality rate among those infected with bird flu is extremely high (50%). To date, about 130 people have died from the disease, most of them in Asia. The lack of a cure for the disease causes great concern among the health authorities in the countries of the world - including Israel - who have stockpiled stocks of drugs against the disease, such as Relanza and Tamiflu. This is despite the fact that it is well known that these drugs are ineffective against the virus, after it managed to quickly develop a mutation resistant to them. This ability of the virus also prevents the production of an effective vaccine against future strains.
Matrix Pharma takes a different approach to the development of the drug: instead of developing a drug that will neutralize or prevent the entry of viruses - the nature of which is unknown - into human cells, it works on a drug that will keep the attacked cell at its healthy level of function. This will prevent the cell from allowing the culture of the virus and thus its spread will be stopped.
The drug development process is very lengthy, and despite this, less than 10% of the drugs that reach the clinical trial stage pass the approvals of the authorities, mainly due to the toxicity of the drug or its partial effectiveness.
Matrix Pharma scientists, led by Dr. Marcel Turk, developed a process in which the drug's activity is tested simultaneously with its possible toxicity from the very beginning of the process. The developed platform is based on artificial intelligence, which conducts simultaneous optimization of ten and more indices in all stages of development and sorting of the starting materials tested in the laboratory, until finding those materials with the highest chances of success in the pre-clinical and clinical stages of drug testing.
Due to the unique process, the cost of the entire discovery process is only about a million dollars, an amount that is considered extremely small compared to the enormous costs involved in developing drugs using the classical methods. Matrix Pharma is managed by Zion Blas, a member of a family engaged in international trade in infrastructure. The company has branches in Israel, Great Britain, Germany and the USA.
One response
The important point here is not only that the company claims to have a solution to bird flu, but a much bigger claim that it has succeeded in creating a mechanism that dramatically reduces the cost of drug development. If she is right in this claim, then this is a global revolution because the cost of developing a new drug reaches on average hundreds of millions of dollars for each new development. I wish they were telling the truth.