Antiviral Methods and Protocols

Abstract

Viruses are the leading cause of disease and death worldwide, and antiviral drugs are one of the most effective ways, in addition to vaccines, to control and manage viral infections. Although antiviral drugs have been successfully developed for some viral diseases, there remains a clear unmet medical need to develop novel antiviral agents for the control and management of many viruses that currently have no or limited treatment options as well as a need to overcome the limitations associated with the existing antiviral drugs, such as adverse effects and emergence of drug-resistant mutations. The fi rst edition of Antiviral Methods and Protocols was published in the Methods in Molecular Medicine series (discontinued some years ago) in 2000. This new edition, pub- lished in the Methods in Molecular Biology series, refl ects the major technical advances for the last 13 years in antiviral research and discovery. Although it is fl agged as the second edition, all chapters are completely new, and none of the chapters is simply updated from the previous edition. This edition focuses on many important human viruses that cause major problems in public health, such as human immunodefi ciency virus type 1 (HIV-1), hepatitis viruses (hepatitis B and C viruses), herpes viruses, and infl uenza virus. Many new chapters describing antiviral methods and protocols against respiratory viruses, such as human respiratory syncytial virus (4 chapters), and some important emerging viruses, such as dengue virus (7 chapters), West Nile virus (1 chapter), and chikungunya virus (2 chapters), are included. In addition, as the in vivo evaluation of antiviral effi cacy and modes of action using animal models is very important to antiviral drug discovery and development, several chapters describing animal models for evaluation of antiviral agents in vivo are also presented. Consistent with the approach of the Methods in Molecular Biology series, each chapter contains detailed cutting-edge research techniques that are currently used in the fi eld of antiviral research. Many methods and protocols presented in this edition are fully validated, high-throughput antiviral assays that can be used for screening compound libraries in phar- maceutical companies and research institutions. Overall, this new edition of Antiviral Methods and Protocols will serve as a laboratory reference for pharmaceutical and academic biologists, medicinal chemists, and pharmacologists as well as for virologists in the fi eld of antiviral research and drug discovery. I would like to thank Professor John Walker, chief editor of the series, for his advice. I also wish to express my gratitude to the editors from Springer, especially Patrick Marton, David Casey, Anne Meagher and Paul Wehn, for making this new edition possible, and to Sundaramoorthy Balasubramanian, Project Manager at SPi Global, India, for his valuable contribution to edit this book, and to all the chapter authors for their valuable contribu- tions to this book.