Eli5 Antibiotics work well with bacteria, but then why can’t we develop the same for viruses?What’s the big difference between them?
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Bacteria are complete living cells, that eat and reproduce spontaneously. This gives us a lot of different mechanisms we can target – we can stop them eating, we can stop them reproducing, we can make them overheat, we can destroy their defensive capsules and so much more.
Viruses are just packages of DNA or RNA (which is basically just unstable DNA) inside a shell. They don’t eat or reproduce themselves. Instead, they infiltrate cells within the host body, where the shell breaks apart and releases the DNA. The infected cell’s machinery then starts copying the virus instead of its own DNA, spending all its resources to make as many copies as possible. Once it has run out, the cell dies and the virus clones are released.
Anti-viral drugs have very few direct targets. What we can do is either disrupt the shell and destroy the DNA before it infects a cell, or jam up the mechanism it uses to infect cells. Once a virus is inside a cell, it’s much harder to target with drugs, cos it’s hidden by the cell (and drugs can’t easily distinguish between clean cells and infected cells). Plus, our immune systems already cover most of these targets anyway. Any anti-viral drug we developed would just be competing with the immune system to do the same job, so it’s more effective to create things that bolster the immune system instead, like vaccines.
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