Functional Category
Antimicrobial & Antiviral
Last updated
Compounds that act on a pathogen rather than on the host: viral enzymes, the machinery a virus uses to enter cells, and bacterial or fungal targets. It is kept separate from Immune Modulators on purpose. A compound that works by changing the host's response and only incidentally reduces an infection is filed under Immune Modulators instead.
Why it matters here
Activity against an organism is nearly always first shown in a dish, at concentrations that bear no relation to what reaches tissue in a body, so the gap between the in_vitro rung and anything above it is the whole question on these records.
What it is not
Killing a virus in cell culture is not an antiviral result in a person. Many antimicrobial peptides show activity only at concentrations that would be toxic or unreachable in a living body, and this is the most over-read finding in the category. Evidence that a compound shifts an immune marker is likewise not evidence of antimicrobial activity.
Also called
- antimicrobial & antiviral
- antimicrobial and antiviral
- antiviral
- antimicrobial
- anti-viral
- anti-microbial
- antibacterial
- antifungal
- pathogen-directed
Pathogen-directed is the precise description of what unites this category: the target is the organism, not the person.
Compounds carrying this term
None on file yet. This term is in the controlled vocabulary but no compound record currently uses it — which is a statement about our coverage, not about the term.