A Novel Potential Therapy for HSV

Two medications are licensed in the United States for the treatment of infection with genital herpes simplex virus (HSV): valacyclovir (approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1995) and famciclovir (approved in 1997). All studied and licensed drugs for HSV infections assessed to date are selective inhibitors of HSV DNA polymerase and act as analogues of nucleoside triphosphate.1 The report by Wald and colleagues in this issue of the Journal 2 introduces two fundamentally new approaches to the study of medications for the treatment of genital herpes. One approach involves the application of daily quantitative polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) analysis to define . . .