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
I work in the pharma industry, not specifically with antivirals, but I have a bit of knowledge.
There are two factors at play.
To kill off a disease, you basically need to find a poison that works on the disease, but not on the host. Weakening the host would just make things worse.
For bacteria and fungi, they’ve evolved a lot of traits not shared by animals. So it’s very easy to make something that screws up, say, their cell walls, which animals don’t have. You don’t even need to narrow down the species too hard because many of these traits are shared by multiple families.
Viruses are just a string of DNA or RNA in a protein shell, which are the same basic building blocks that we’re made of, they don’t have any complex structures. You’d have to be extremely carefully specific to engineer something that targets a virus and not a human.
The second factor is that viruses aren’t alive. What I mean by this is that, when they’re outside of a host cell, they don’t do anything, and they don’t NEED to do anything. With a bacteria, all you need to do is pop its little membrane, or give it a little microbe heart attack, and it’ll die, rendering it harmless and ready for cleanup. For a virus, there’s nothing you can do to easily “kill” it, the only death it has is physical destruction. And the drugs that can do that would be very dangerous to pump into your bloodstream.
There are a variety of antiviral drugs on the market, but due to their complexity and specificity they can be pretty expensive. They can’t “kill” the virus directly, instead they’ll typically glob onto it and try to impair it as much as they can in hopes of stalling the infection and giving the immune system more time.
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