Fujifilm pharma arm Toyama’s Avigan emerges as potential Ebola cure
22 Oct 2014
One time Eastman Kodak rival Fujifilm took the global spotlight recently with its anti-influenza drug emerging as a potential drug to treat Ebola patients, Financial Times reported.
The report quoted Fujifilm's chief executive, Shigetaka Komori as saying if requested the company could quickly produce the drug in mass amounts.
The drug, called Avigan, helps block replication of viral genes within an infected cell and gained approval in Japan in March to treat influenza.
Researchers are hoping it would work for a range of other diseases including Ebola, West Nile and Marburg virus.
A French nurse, this week recovered from Ebola after she was treated with Avigan, and the French and Guinean governments would begin clinical trials of the drug to treat Ebola from November.
The company had supplies on hand to treat 20,000 people and said this week that it would ratchet up production from next month to cater to overseas demand.
The company's shares were up 16 per cent since the since the first week of August the potential wider potential of the drug came to be known.
Fujifilm ventured into the field of medicine as part of a corporate makeover that started with the collapse of its analogue film business with the coming of the digital age.
Meanwhile, according to British researchers the experimental Japanese flu drug might also work against the winter vomiting bug norovirus, Reuters reported.
Though like the research with Ebola, the drug's use against norovirus was also at an early stage, a study in mice found that Fujifilm Corp's Avigan, or favipiravir, was effective at reducing - and in some cases eliminating - norovirus infection.
The drug acts to cause the virus to self-destruct by triggering a process known as ''lethal mutagenesis,'' which causes errors in its genetic information. Effectively, the virus mutates itself to death.
Avigan, developed by Fujifilm group company Toyama Chemical Co Ltd, will undergo trials as a treatment for Ebola in Guinea in mid-November and the company said on Monday it was stepping up production of the medicine.
The journal eLife has published the findings of from the norovirus study in mice at the University of Cambridge.
