Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Eric Christensen.

You can track me down on LinkedIn. You can also find me at reallife pharmacology.com or MedEd101.com

and hit the contact button there. And you can shoot me an email if you've got any questions, concerns,

looking for more information there. I try to respond to all the emails I get. I definitely do.

So you can find me there. With that, let's get into it today. I'm covering a cyclovir.

Brand name of this medication is Zoverax. And I'm really going to focus primarily on the

oral dosage form here comes as IV as well. I guess systemic drug in systemic circulation rather

than the topical acyclavir. So that's going to be my primary focus here.

So first off, getting into that mechanism of action,

how does this drug work?

Well, you've got to remember that it's used for viral infections,

and it's only used for certain viral infections.

Okay, so, you know, your common head cold, influenza, those type of viral infections,

this drug does not get used for that.

So it's important to remember that.

The primary uses I'll talk about after the mechanism here.

But how this drug works, it's actually transformed from its original state by the virus's own

thymidine kinase, and it gets converted to acyclovir monophosphate, and it continues to have phosphates added,

phosphate groups added to the drug

until it becomes acyclivir trifosate.

And that's really the active component

that prevents blocks that DNA production

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