It seems like photodynamic therapy is effective across a broad range of microbes and I can’t think of obvious dual-use risks.
There also don’t seem to be many human trials, so this seems like an underfunded area and could be useful for pandemic response.
I don’t have time to write a more detailed post on this but would encourage anyone reading this to do so.
(I’m experimenting with making lower-effort posts, because restricting myself to higher quality posts was resulting in me making close to 0 posts. If you think this kind of post is too low-effort and makes the EA Forum worse overall, let me know in the comments).
Antiviral photodynamic therapy seems underfunded
Antiviral photodynamic therapy basically involves:
administering a ‘photosensitive’ drug which viruses can absorb
shining a laser at the area infected with viruses
the drug reacts to the laser and damages the viruses
Here’s a review on antiviral photodynamic therapy:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7883714/
It seems like photodynamic therapy is effective across a broad range of microbes and I can’t think of obvious dual-use risks.
There also don’t seem to be many human trials, so this seems like an underfunded area and could be useful for pandemic response.
I don’t have time to write a more detailed post on this but would encourage anyone reading this to do so.
(I’m experimenting with making lower-effort posts, because restricting myself to higher quality posts was resulting in me making close to 0 posts. If you think this kind of post is too low-effort and makes the EA Forum worse overall, let me know in the comments).