For most bacterial (and even fungal) infections, we’ve developed medications you can take and the infection is gone in a few days.
But most viruses remain completely untreatable. The best we can do is develop treatments that manage the symptoms, or vaccines that boost your body’s natural defense and make it somewhat less likely that you’ll get infected, or if you do get infected it’ll be a less severe case.
The flu, COVID, RSV, swine flu, bird flu, HIV, Ebola, even the common cold. We don’t really have a “cure” for any of them. Why not?
What’s different about a virus that makes it so much harder to just develop a pill you can pop to make it go away?
In: Biology
Bacteria contain a lot of molecular machinery that is unique to them and completely distinct from eukaryotic life. These make nice targets for antibiotics which would have little crossover to mammalian cells. But viruses have no machinery. They hijack our cells machines to replicate, which means we don’t have a clear target. Viruses do make some unique proteins, such as their own reverse transcriptase, which they need to replicate. We can target that, but it has some homologous with our transcriptase proteins, making selectivity and issue again. Basically, because a virus is so simple, it’s hard to target.
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