Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Sam Lee, Co-CEO of Cocrystal Pharma, discusses novel antiviral therapeutics to treat norovirus. This highly contagious virus causes acute gastroenteritis, and there is no known treatment or vaccine.  Cocrystal is developing a compound that targets the essential enzymes of the virus, showing promising results in inhibiting norovirus replication and showing possible use in treating human rhinovirus and enterovirus. The goal is to develop a protease inhibitor therapeutic for norovirus that can alleviate symptoms and potentially prevent infection spread in high-risk environments. Sam explains, "Let me step back and tell you how we approach the noro antiviral drug development. So, we're focusing on what we call direct-acting antiviral therapeutics. We're targeting viral essential enzymes, and we initiated this noro program looking at the essential genes such as RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. We have really exciting hits, but we also look at the protease. Norovirus has this essential protease, which is absolute