Stanford scientists use abandoned drug to fight off viruses in a lab dish

I don't mind that this looks like a translation to Simple English like in the xkcd book, but I find annoying that they never put the name of the drug. For the curious: GSK983

The technique to select the drug they have to mix to reduce the toxicity is very interesting.

The GSK983 drug inhibits one enzymes to produce pyrimidines (the bases C, T and U of the ADN/ARN). But providing deoxycytidine (the base C) reduce the toxicity for human cells.

All the virus they name are RNA-virus, so I guess this only work for this kind of virus, and it's coherent with what I understand of the abstract of the article. (this exclude foe example herpes, chickenpox, smallpox, ...)

Link to the abstract of the article: http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...