University researchers are using a new approach to develop what they hope will be a better anti-viral drug to combat the flu.

Associate Professor Mark Tompkins, who leads the project with Professor Ralph Tripp, said he is confident in the drug’s effectiveness in preventing and treating common strains of influenza that circulate annually worldwide, as well as highly pathogenic strains of avian flu.

Tompkins’ research team has published data showing their drug works on highly pathogenic avian influenza in animals and are now screening for better candidates to move forward to testing with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Since 2003 there have been more than 100 cases, mostly in southeast Asia, of humans contracting avian flu from birds, Tompkins said. Of these cases, nearly 50 percent resulted in death.

The highly mutative nature of influenza could potentially lead to a strain more easily transmittable from person to person, Tompkins said.

He said the drugs and vaccines currently on the market attack the virus-encasing proteins, which mutate rapidly and constantly, keeping the virus alive.

Some of these drugs are sensitive to changes in the virus – they lose their effectiveness when the proteins change, thus leading to the development of resistant strains, he said.

Tompkins said the new approach uses a process called RNA interference to target the genetic material of the virus, which changes only minimally.

“Since what we’re targeting is very conserved, we don’t need to know what specific virus it is for (the drug) to be effective,” Tompkins said. “What we’re developing should work against almost any influenza virus that appears.”

Therefore, the length of production time would be minimized, he said. The drugs and vaccines currently on the market take six months to produce, a window of time that Tompkins said is too large in the event of an avian flu pandemic.

A pandemic in the United States could result in a “best case scenario” of 200,000 deaths to as many as 1.9 million, according to a government plan reported by the Associated Press Tuesday.

Tompkins said the drug should be FDA tested within a year, but it is hard to predict the period of time until it would be available.

“We hope that if there were a real concern about a pandemic, that it would be fast-tracked,” he said.

Tompkins said they hope to know if they will receive direct appropriations from Congress before the end of the year.