Things have been going well for us at Kimer Med. Here's the latest:
Dengue Fever is a tropical viral disease that infects up to 400 million people every year in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America. According to the CDC, it lacks effective treatments, resulting in about 100 million people developing symptomatic disease and 22,000 deaths from those infections every year. Dengue is transmitted by mosquitos. Getting infected a second time is much more risky than the first time.
Dengue is also interesting to us since it has some features in common with SARS-CoV-2, including having the same high-level features: positive-sense single-stranded RNA with an envelope.
For those reasons, we decided to test a recent batch of VT against Dengue virus (Type 2). Results? Success!
In laboratory testing using cell cultures, our compound produced up to an 87% reduction in the number of cells that the virus killed--and we think there's room for improvement. The compound had a therapeutic index (ratio of effective dose to toxic dose) on par with Ribavirin, a commercial antiviral drug, which means it's also showing relatively low toxicity.
These very encouraging results confirm that we now have a formulation and a fabrication and purification process that results in a compound with a strong antiviral effect. This is an important milestone for Kimer Med!
Thanks for your continued interest and support.