Why do we have a lot of antibiotics, but few antiviral meds? I’m not even considering HIV, because I know it’s has a different structure.
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Bacteria are alive. They move, they breathe, they eat, they react to external stimulus. They have a complex chemical metabolism.
This means that you can kill them, usually by poisoning them with something that they can’t tolerate but you can.
A virus isn’t alive – it’s more like a biochemical landmine. It doesn’t eat or breathe or react to things, it just waits to run into one of your cells. Then it “activates” and hijacks the cell to clone itself.
That’s their only function, and it makes them difficult to “kill” because they were never alive. You can’t chemically destroy them very easily because your own cells are made of the same materials.
A virus uses the hosts own abilities to create more viruses, the outer part of a virus acts like a key to the lock of a cell and opens up the cell so the virus can hide inside making the virus very difficult to hunt down and destroy.
Regarding the lack of antivirals, I asked my uncle who happens to be a virologist.
He attributes the difficulty to produce antiviral treatment (be it medicine or vaccines) to two main factors:
1. Viruses mutate quite quickly, so even if you get to synthesise some kind of treatment/prevention the chances of it not working anymore due to mutations are high, just like the streams of corona virus.
2. In his words “bacteria kinda are alike”, in a way that a single antibiotic may work on a miriad of different bacteria. On the other hand, viruses require specific antivirus for each of them.
Bacteria are outside the cells (well most of them do) and they use different machinery to produce energy and metabolize material to make more of themselves. Because they use different mechanisms to reproduce and make energy it is usually safe to target those mechanism to stop them from growing and let your own immune system kill what is reproducing slower. It always a race between the enemy production and the friendly force production.
Viruses (and very few bacteria) infect cells and hide within the walls! It’s hard to detect them and they use our machinery to reproduce, so you have nothin to target to kill them off easily. The best you can do is stop them from getting behind your walls. The ability to hide, and to get behind the walls is why viruses are harder to treat then bacteria. some do however use different mechanism to make their clones within the infected cells. These types of treatments are harsh and can interfere with our own mechanisms to some degree.
the main way the body see’s virus infections is through normal immune surveillance techniques that interrogate normal cells asking them to identify themselves. They do this by presenting their internal parts as ID cards. When they accidently present a viral ID card they are caught and killed. Then counterpart immune cells learn to recognize these invaders externally, but only have they been caught within the walls of your own cells.
The problem is always how you can kill something *selectively*. It means that you kill that and only that. So for example you van use fire to kill a virus, but it kills the person too. Fire is not selective.
In biology, if you want to kill something selectively, you need to find an important biochemical process in it, that is *different* from those things that you don’t want to kill. And you need a chemical that blocks one version of the process, but doesn’t block other things. Those herbicides that kill one plant but don’t kill the other, work on the same principle.
So bacteria are living beings on their own. They are evolutionary very far from us, and we have a lot of differences. They have cell walls, we don’t. They have different structure for their ribosomes and some other key processes. So you can find a chemical that blocks the building process of cell walls. No problem for us, hard life for them. Or a chemical that blocks the bacterial version of ribosomes but doesn’t block ours.
Viruses on the contrary use our biochemical processes to build themselves. A good virus is biochemically very close to the host. They use the same ribosomes (ours). They have actually only a very few processes that we do not have that they bring with themselves.
One such process can be the one that the so called retroviruses bring along, which is inserting their genes into the host genes. For that they use a special stuff that we don’t have. And imagine this special stuff can actually be blocked without killing the person thus can block the virus with a chemical that is harmless for us.
But unfortunately it is only one family of viruses, and there are many other viruses that don’t have any special blockable process.
Viruses stretch the definition of “alive” in some really weird directions. They don’t carry on nearly as many of the essential life processes as bacteria do, and it turns out to be a lot harder to kill something that’s only kinda-sorta alive in the first place. Antibiotics, for example, typically work by poisoning bacteria, but viruses don’t have that kind of metabolism: you can’t feed poison to something that doesn’t eat.
Viruses mostly use your own cells machinery to replicate. Any drug that targets your own cellular machinery would be toxic. In addition, different viruses use very different machinery so one drug tends to only work well for one type of virus (with dine exceptions). As a result there are fewer targets for antiviral drugs that are specific to the virus.
Meanwhile bacteria use different machinery from your cells. There are a lot more targets and a lot more similarity between different bacteria allowing for broader spectrum drugs.
Viruses are really damn small. Much much smaller than bacteria. Certain classes of viruses called “bacteriophages” only infect bacteria.
This smaller size leads to less complexity combined with a faster reproductive rate. The fast reproductive rate leads to faster evolution/adaptation to stimuli.
Bacterial infections are treated with antibiotics. Viral infections are harder to treat, though. In most cases, a doctor will treat the symptoms so that the body does not get overwhelmed with problems like high temperature, blood pressure or dehydration.
Bacteria cells are quite different from humans cells. Imagine your in a room with lots of people and lots of bugs. (Quite scary yes) You can spray the whole room with soap water and only kill off all the bugs.
As soap water is not harmful to human skin but will seep into and absolutely melt the insides of an insect.
Antibiotics is baisically the same thing, human cells ignore, bacteria cells melt.
Virus is completely opposite. An virus byitself is a very small and inert object thats not alive, so by effect its harder to “kill” it. Think of an virus is like an plant seed. Quite hardy, and what would kill it would kill everything else aswell (we don’t want that). How it reproduce is by injecting its own replication-code inside human cells.
So in this case is like you have a room of lots of people, but some of them believes in cuthulu god and is spreading the idea to every other person. There is nothing you can spray into the room to only kill the cuthulu belivers.
Anti viral med does 2 primary things.
1. They slow down virus transfer. This makes it hard for virus to bind onto your cells. Think of taking the room and creating lots of noise so people can’t hear one another very well. Not the best solution, but helps your immune system catch up.
2. They boost your immune system. Your immune system can fight virus, think of them as thought police, if a human cell shows signs of infection, they terminate them.
Overall, they are still assisting your own immune system, instead of outright killing the bad guys.
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