Innovative Drug Discovery for Emerging Viral Diseases

Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the sobering potential of certain members of several viral families to cause unexpected outbreaks with high-burden diseases that might disrupt healthcare systems and devastate economies in the future. Currently, no highly active direct-acting antiviral drugs are available for several virus families such as the togaviridae (chikungunya virus), hantaviridae (Hantavirus) or the filoviridae (Ebolavirus, Marburg Virus). Additionally, the rapid development of drug resistance, exemplified by all classes of HIV antiretrovirals, presents extra hurdles to disease control. Therefore, proactive and innovative antiviral drug discovery is urgently needed to ensure preparedness to mitigate the threat caused by these viral pathogens.

Antivirals have traditionally been developed by directly targeting essential viral components through structure-based rational design. Other strategies have been less exploited, such as function-based high-throughput screening (HTS) either in vitro/vivo or in silicon, targeting host factors that are critical for virus replication but dispensable for the host, and potentiation of immune responses (i.e., immunomodulators). This Special Issue of Viruses seeks to attract top-level publications covering conventional or innovative designs, developments and validations of antivirals in relation to emerging/re-emerging RNA viral pathogens. We invite you to share your most insightful research, reviews and hypotheses on these important topics.

Dr. Chaoping Chen
Dr. Andreas Jekle
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Viruses is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.