PRB Pharmaceuticals and Lee's Pharmaceuticals have announced the discovery that PRB'S patent pending botanical extract, V38-AMF-1, completely inhibits bird flu (H5N1) and Fujian Flu (H3N2) infections in vitro.
The results come from the second arm of a multi-center, anti-viral project jointly sponsored by PRB Pharmaceuticals and Lee's Pharmaceuticals.
In the first arm of the project, researchers led by Dr. John Tam at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, found V38-AMF-1 to be effective against a variety of pathogens including SARS CoV, the virus responsible for causing severe acute respiratory syndrome.
"We are extremely excited about this important and timely discovery," says Dr. Charles Hensley, CO-Chairman and CO-CEO at PRB Pharmaceuticals. "Since bird flu first emerged, researchers around the world have been searching for a safe compound that can inhibit the bird flu virus (H5N1).
Our method of utilizing botanical sources for anti-microbial solutions is starting to pay off. It is really a common sense approach as plants have developed powerful anti-viral strategies over millions of years of co-evolution with viruses," says Dr. Hensley. "This year, Asia experienced the largest outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in history and the recent outbreaks in Thailand and Vietnam have raised new concerns of an impending human influenza pandemic. It is just a matter of time before a variant capable of causing human to human transmission emerges and is likely to be a result of co-infection and gene swapping between H5N1 and the human influenza strain H3N2. It's really a disaster waiting to happen."
"The first line of defense against a human influenza pandemic involving bird flu is to keep the avian stocks healthy," commented Hensley. "To address this objective, we developed Flustat, a V38-AMF-1 based agricultural product to prevent and treat bird flu infections in chickens. Flustat comes as a powder that is added to drinking water of the chickens. We have already demonstrated that Flustat protects chicken embryos from H5N1 infection. We will begin testing Flustat on poultry stocks in the fall of 2004 with the goal of supplying poultry farms by the first quarter of 2005."