“Better flu treatments are desperately needed,” said the study’s co-author David Markovitz, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, in a press release. “Tamiflu is only modestly effective, especially in critically ill patients, and influenza can develop resistance to it. But we also hope that BanLec could become useful in situations such as emergency pandemic response, and military settings, where the precise cause of an infection is unknown but a viral cause is suspected.”