Now believe me, I am not picking on you, I'm sharing my reasoning here.

Lets tease these two things apart :

"As far as I understand, their idea works when applied directly / on a micro scale"

So on the micro scale, with direct application, there are literally hundreds of things which kill the common cold virus. My favorite happens to be soap.

But you and I would never believe that soap was some new cure for the common cold because we have a (hopefully) good relationship with soap, and we know that nobody that had their mouth washed out with soap for swearing in class suddenly had a cold clear up.

" they'd have to still solve the issues of mass production and distribution through the organism."

This is the "tricky bit" like the thermodynamics are often the villain of free energy schemes. Mass production isn't a problem because once we get to the point where mass production is the only step between product and market there will be infinite money available. The "distribution through the organism" is a problem. People who solve that problem for a variety of drugs, people like Alza, are worth billions of dollars because it is a problem.

The common theme in miracle cure and endless energy proposals is that they can't avoid reality. We joke about the difference between theory and practice, this is it.

I read a really earnest pitch about a car which used Titanium Dioxide (massively abundant! really cheap!) the fact that ultraviolet light (in sunlight) can split water into hydrogen and oxygen when it shines on water that is in contact with Titanium dioxide [1], and a car with a sunroof of water sloshing around that has a UV transparent top and a bottom painted with Titanium Dioxide creating free oxygen and hydrogen that is to be recombined in a fuel cell to power the car and get turned back into water.

It all works, fuel cells, titanium dioxide splitting water, making electricity and electric cars. The problem is that there is only so much energy in sunlight, 1kW per square meter at the best of times, and a car roof is at best a square meter of surface area, and the typical car power plant, even in golf carts, is at least 15kW. So no matter what you do, there isn't enough light to fuel up your car. That said you could park it for a month, and then perhaps drive it around for the day, but really useful? Not so much.

These guys have found another way to kill viruses. Their technique has some benefits (like soap) in that viruses won't develop immunity to their method. So to figure out a way to transport their method into a living mammal without doing damage to the mammal requires some mice and inspiration, and very little money. If you are engineering a solution (where the mice are just test cases not part of the experiment directly) you can use cheap mice, if you want to publish you probably want a line of genetically bred mice and they are more expensive but not more than a few thousand dollars. Once you figure that step out you have two parts of the treasure map. Now you move up to pigs or if your feeling lucky, monkeys. That gets a bit more expensive but still not "omg where am I going to find the money" expensive. At USC the bio guys were getting $50,000 grants to come up with microbes that were better at eating paper. They ran a full chemistry lab for a school year on that kind of money. If you have a great idea you can save your pennies (its not going away if its real) and fund yourself for that level of investment.

So in these kinds of pitches, its never "we just need money" it is always we need a solution to this insoluble problem.
The money just keeps them in noodles while they bang their head against the wall.

[1] http://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/news/science-news/201...