Virus like particles (VLP) for drug discovery

Drug discovery against infectious disease requires the standard biological assays. The biological assay for viral disease is depends on the infection of cultured cells with virus and observation of its effect by microscopic techniques, viral load quantification using plaque assay, or reverse transcription-PCR. 

This conventional method is time consuming and limits the screening of large library. Instead, VLP containing luciferase-expressing replicon can be used to infect cells and monitor the antiviral activity through the expression of luciferase (Puig-Basagoiti et al. 2005).