(And I present this as a purely factual question [no hot debate please ].)
I like to think that I am not too old. And I still remember when I was a child, if you had a virus, you were out of luck. They often gave you an antibiotic when you had a cold. But that was to prevent a secondary infection ( yeah, right ).
Anyway there are a whole slew of antivirals now. There’s Tamiflu if you have the flu. There’s even a cure for Hepatitis, I forget the name of just now.
Where did all these antivirals come from? And my question: does it have something to do with HIV research? I have no idea. But I wonder.
What are some of the basic types of anti-viral molecules ?
antibody …basically extract them from blood (of mammals ) or manufacture them in a tub. monoclonal mainly means that its locked in to a single molecule. polyclonal means that its got a whole lot of different molecules, perhaps because its antibodies filtered out of horses blood or something like that, or creating a tub of white cells that creates the antibodies. Two monoclonals together really don’t make it polyclonal. Polyclonal would mean it could trigger a reaction, an unwanted sideeffect.
amino acid attack … by supplying pre-assembled amino acids that are carefully designed and constructed to be seen as correct by the virus replication system, but it actually contains an error.
receptor blocking - the virus can’t get into the cell
infected cell labelling - the cell is killed by the immune system before its used to replicate the virus
immune system prompting - while this mimics a vaccine, antivirals are not vaccines by definition. the difference is that vaccine uses proteins (or almost perfect copies ) from the pathogen, the immunity boosting antiviral is some different trigger … its like a hormone or steroid to tell the immune system to set to work, but it can be quite specific to system needed to fight that virus family.
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