CytoDyn, Inc has rounded out its European patent portfolio with new patents in Ireland, France, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Germany. The company is also receiving new patents in Hong Kong and Canada.
CytoDyn's patent portfolio protects a platform method of treating HIV/AIDS as a first step toward modernizing global healthcare in an environment with finite resources.
When the environment turns toxic for some particular form of life, that life-form either goes extinct or evolves into a new species that is adapted to the new environment, a process referred to as natural selection. Disease-causing germs tend to be hardy and adaptive and, as such, usually do not go extinct. Rather, the widespread use of antimicrobial drugs to destroy germs will cause those germs to evolve into drug-resistant species. The traditional approach to this problem has been an unending chain of new drugs to treat the germs that have become resistant to the old drugs until such time as the germs become resistant to the new drugs, and so on. This approach has maintained long-term profitability for the drug companies while escalating the costs of healthcare.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, this traditional way of dealing with natural selection cannot go on indefinitely. There is only a finite number of chemical structures that can be used to kill germs. Despite the eventual failure of this approach, the medical-pharmaceutical-regulatory complex has resisted innovation for the same reason that the American automobile manufacturers were slow to admit to the need for fuel-efficient vehicles, despite a dwindling supply of oil. For one thing, retooling requires a substantial capital investment. For another, innovation marginalizes the engineers and managers whose expertise centres on the designing, manufacturing, and marketing of traditional products.
The company's lead product Cytolin is a monoclonal antibody that blocks a weakness in the human immune system so it can control HIV infection as effectively as other species of primates can control it.