Innovative Drug Discovery for Emerging Viral Diseases, 2nd Edition
A special issue of Viruses (ISSN 1999-4915). This special issue belongs to the section "General Virology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2025 | Viewed by 35
Special Issue Editor
Interests: HIV-1 protease autoprocessing mechanism and drug discovery
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue will represent a continuation of our previous Special Issue, “Innovative Drug Discovery for Emerging Viral Diseases” (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/viruses/special_issues/D33OWIB6W1).
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the sobering fact that certain members of several viral families could cause unexpected future outbreaks of high-burden diseases that could disrupt healthcare systems and devastate economies. Currently, no highly active direct-acting antiviral drugs are available for several virus families, such as togaviridae (chikungunya virus), hantaviridae (Hantavirus), and filoviridae (Ebolavirus, Marburg virus). Additionally, the rapid development of drug resistance, exemplified by all classes of HIV antiretrovirals, presents extra hurdles in disease control. Therefore, proactive and innovative antiviral drug discovery is urgently needed to ensure adequate preparedness, in order to mitigate the threat caused by these viral pathogens.
Antivirals have traditionally been developed by directly targeting essential viral components through structure-based rational design. Other strategies have been less frequently exploited, such as function-based high-throughput screening (HTS) in vitro, in vivo, or in silico, targeting host factors that are critical to virus replication but dispensable for the host and the potentiation of immune responses (i.e., immunomodulators). For this Special Issue of Viruses, we welcome top-level articles covering conventional or innovative designs, developments, and validations in antivirals in relation to emerging/re-emerging RNA viral pathogens. We invite you to share your most insightful research, reviews, and hypotheses on these important topics.
Dr. Chaoping Chen
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- antivirals
- drug discovery
- high-throughput screen
- SARS-CoV-2
- influenza virus
- RSV
- zika
- ebola virus
- chikungunya virus
- emerging/re-emerging RNA viral pathogens
- host-directed therapies
- immunomodulator
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