Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into US biodefence research. You might expect scientists working on infectious diseases to be unequivocally delighted. But things aren't that simple, says Erika Check. Three years ago, Karl Hostetler founded a company called Chimerix, based on an eminently practical, if unglam-orous, idea. Hostetler, who works at the University of California, San Diego, had invented a way to repackage the antiviral drug cidofovir so that it could be taken as a pill rather than intravenously. Faced with 'sexier' investment opportunities, however, venture capitalists weren't much interested, and the company's prospects looked bleak. But in March 2002, Chimerix's fortunes changed dramatically. At a meeting in Prague, Hostetler and his colleagues revealed that cidofovir blocks smallpox infections in human cells and lab mice. The US government was searching desperately for smallpox treatments that could counter a potential bioterrorist attack, and giving patients cidofovir pills would be much easier than putting thousands of people on intravenous drips. So in September this year, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), based in Bethesda, Maryland, gave Chimerix a five-year, $36-million-dollar grant to make and test cidofovir pills. "I doubt very much that we would have been able to obtain venture-capital funding to pursue this smallpox application," says Chimerix vice-president Kevin Anderson. "Given the investment climate of the past couple of years, it would have been virtually impossible."
展开▼
