Anti-biotics are broad attack agents, why can’t we do the same with viruses? My recent viral conjunctivitis had no cure but time, yet influenza has Tamflu? What’s the key difference between the two that limits our viral solutions?
In: Biology
Viruses are incredibly small, and simple little buggers, and they can very, very quickly change. For an antimicrobial drug to work, it needs to have some specific “thing” to attach to and break in some way. Bacteria are little cells, and they a bunch of machinery and structure that is pretty well preserved across generations. There are more options for us make drugs that can break them. Viruses are basically a bundle of some proteins and nucleic acid that can replicate. They do it super quickly, and can often have fast changes across generations. It’s much harder to make a useful drug that break them, because they have fewer unique things we can target, and they can change them faster.
It’s like the difference of taking apart a car with standardized nuts and bolts, vs. taking apart a small device with custom parts, but that small device is a bit of a shape shifter and the parts change shape over time. We can pretty easily develop wrenches and shit for the car, but making tools that can reliably dismantle the other device is harder.
In that sense, it’s a technically difficult thing to do. If you spend millions and millions of dollars to develop a drug, and it’s obsolete within a year because your target protein has changed, then you’re fucked and out of a bunch money. And finally, most of these common viral infections are already self limited, and don’t pose as much threat in terms of morbidity and mortality when compared to invasive bacterial disease.
In summary:
1. It’s hard to do, and hard to make something that will work for very long.
2. It’s risky financially.
3. It’s a lower priority problem.
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