For some reason, I’m extraordinarily prone to catch colds and other viral infections. And it frustrates me that the doctors can never do anything but treat the symptoms and wait for my immune system to do its work. They tell me, there are a very few medicines that can kill a very few specific viri, but there’s no viral equivalent of pennicillin, no broad-spectrum antiviral drug. Are they at least working on one? Are they any closer to finding one? What is it about viri that makes them so hard to kill, compared to bacteria?
Many of the drugs that have been developed do things like interfere with RNA/Protein synthesis and the like. This has the unfortunate disadvantage of interfering with perfectly legit functions our cells need to perform, since viruses infiltrate our cells and commandeer our genetic machinery to reproduce.
This is my understanding anyway.
A virus is an almost absurdly simple thing. Protein shell with a nucleic acid core, maybe a simple protein or two (e.g. Reverse Transcriptase in HIV), and maybe an outer membrane with polysaccharide markers (usually derived from the host cell). Thus, there would not seem to be as many potential drug targets as in a bacteria.
I would guess that there is not a convenient target for any drug that would apply to all viruses. This is not the case with, say penicillin and bacteria. Penicillin interferes with cell wall formation in bacteria, and most bacteria need a cell wall. As well, penicillin can attack the bacteria in your blood stream, while a virus would typically not be a target until already inserted into your cell, as they are biologically inactive until insertion.
Personally, I don’t want them to make broad-spectrum antivirals. Use of broad-spectrum antibiotics when more specific ones would work is a contributing factor to developing antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
Bacteria are finding ways to sneak around our drugs because the little critters can mutate and multiply really fast. Viruses mutate fast too, and they sneak into our cells and use them for their own dark purposes, and because of that they’re harder to kill. I’d rather not give them an opportunity to weed out their weak members and strengthen their gene pool! Even with a very specific drug, viruses mutate and the drug loses effectiveness. Any wide-spectrum antiviral that gets developed would probably be useless very soon after it gets to market.
Like NoPretentiousCodename said, though, because of their nature it’s hard to find a good target that would work on **all ** viruses. We can try and stop them from entering our cells, but different viruses do that in different ways, using specific receptors. We can try to stop them from inserting their genes into our DNA, and as far as I know, that’s an area of interest these days, but it’s also virus-specific.
Nearly all antibiotics we use today interfere in some way or another with a very special bacterial enzyme (molecular machine) called the Ribosome. This large complex is responsible for assembling all of the proteins in the cell from the instructions incoded in the genetic code. We’re fortunate in that none of the bacterial Ribosomes look anything like the human Ribosome, and all look similar to each other. This means that we can isolate compounds which interrupt the function of any bacterial Ribosome, killing the bugs right quick, and which don’t work on human Ribosomes. The first one found was penicillin, and many of the antibiotics since then have just been penicillin with some novel modifications to improve effectiveness or beat resistances.
A virus, however, inserts itself into a human cell and uses the machinery already present in order to replicate itself. If you want to stop a virus, you have to kill the human cells which are manufacturing more viruses. If you want to kill all of them, there are ways to do that; cyanide or formaldehyde would work great. The problem is specificity - you don’t want to destroy the village to save it. An ideal drug would target only the unhealthy cells, and leave neighboring healthy cells alone, but that’s a tremendously difficult proposition, probably far beyond the scope of any drug we will ever make. The best way to eliminate the virus to let your own immune system do what it was designed to do.
Get bed rest, drink some orange juice, and when you feel better make sure to get moderate exercise and avoid stress. Your own immune system is better adapted to this task than anything doctors can or might someday prescribe for you.
No, we want them to develop broad-spectrum antivirals, but unlike antibiotics, we don’t want them overprescribed and abused. Perhaps he should apply more restrictions on them or require some sort of outside board approval for only serious and potentially injurious cases.
Hey, if we had never developed antibiotics, they never would have helped anyone. We’ve just abused them into developing resistance.