Well I guess you are going to spend lots of time with the "How to solve it" question, since I know many people that didn't find the answer in the academic world. Viruses different from bacterias don't have their own metabolism, they use ours! So it is quite difficult to find a way where it doesn't affect us as well. It is interesting to think about that , bacterias are the perfect organisms to produce drugs since their metabolism is independent and totally different from us. When we switch to superior organisms like fungus and protozoa it becomes difficult again, their metabolism have lot's of similarities with our cells, so it is also challenging. And if we go down to viruses we have this problem, organisms without self-metabolism. Well I would love to see your discoveries in the future! Hopefully, they will bring new insights. I agree with you vaccines aren't perfect, we can see that in the flu vaccine and MANY others, but still, they are what we have now...
!1UP
Thanks for your comment and raising such an interesting and important question. I have found a solution to this by developing the pipeline that specifically increases the chances of screening for those kind of drugs. Though I would leave the details for my next post. Also to answer your question, we don't have to look very far away from nature when looking for those kinds of drugs. Even our body produces these small proteins called antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). Some of these which can specifically bind to viral membrane and which has specific composition and cause agglutination or reduce it's ability to bind to receptors. I have recently communicated a paper on this with a colleague on one such AMP (this AMP is different from solution I have found) and it is currently under review. I will write about it once it is published. Let me know if you have further questions.
nice! great to read about it!