Antiviral Drug Discovery Strategies

Shimon Shatzmiller

Department of Biological Chemistry, Ariel University, Ariel 40700, Israel

Dr. Shimon Shatzmiller, Department of Biological Chemistry, Ariel University, Ariel 40700, Israel.

Keywords: Antiviral Drug; Magic Bullet

Abstract

Here is a frog in South American jungles…. this is the beautiful song by Paul Simon Señorita with a Necklace of Tears, Paul Simon, the second verse [1]:
So we found the green little frog, Phyllomedusa Savage [2], from the Amazon/Orinoco jungles, whose skin
contains many antimicrobial peptides, and focused on Dermaseptin S4 [3,4] as one of the most active one, and this in many ways.
Ehrlich and his co-workers [5] tried hundreds of chemicals on the microbes that caused syphilis. In 1909, Ehrlich's new colleague Sahachiro Hata (1873-1938) brought with him a method of producing syphilis infections in laboratory rabbits, and discovered (1910) that drug no. 606 worked. The first ‘magic bullet’ had been found, and was marketed under the name Salvarsan. This was the first "magic bullet".

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