Smart new antiviral concept--DRACO at MIT Lincoln Lab--Todd Rider

...without other research in conjunction one day this will fail as evolution takes it's course.

Yes! Evolution does invariably take its course. Sooner or later nature circumvents you or you discover unintended consequences of your bright idea.

You might have already wondered about my mention of the injection route, since we already give millions of people a year injections to combat viral infection: flu shots. Those, though, are vaccines meant to last the whole season (and beyond). DRACO proteins get cleared out in mice on a time scale of days; they wouldn't be expected to have any long-range immune effects. (Of course, their broad antiviral effects, versus the sometimes way-too-specific nature of a vaccine, is a strong point in their favor). But this brings up another issue that's going to have to be addressed: when you look at the graphs of the mice experiments, you note that the DRACOs were given either on Day 0 or Day -1 compared to the exposure to virus.

That's actually a big deal in this field. The problem with antiviral therapies has always been that you don't usually know that you've been infected until, well, after you've been infected. Sometimes that lag time is rather long, and it's always long enough for the virus to get a good running start. Symptoms, after all, don't occur until things are well under way. In the real world, the two opportunities for antiviral therapies are (1) something that you can take long before you're even exposed, and that lasts for a long time (like a vaccine) or (2) something that you can take after you've already realized that you're sick (like an antiviral drug). So far, the DRACO proteins fall in between these two, and the next challenge for these agents is to see if they can stretch into one or the other.