why is it so hard to make a virus killing drug?
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Antibiotics target weaknesses in bacteria. Viruses have weaknesses too, but they’re also sneaky because they need to get their DNA/RNA inside of us to multiply.
The parts of the cell our body uses to make more proteins (ribosomes) are the same parts that a virus will use to make more of itself. If we use a drug that hurts ribosomes, the virus won’t be able to multiply… but then our cells can’t use it, either, which hurts us.
The best antivirals keep viruses from entering our cells in the first place, but because there’s a lot of different ways to enter a cell, it’s hard to make an antiviral that can be used for lots of different viruses.
Some viruses (retroviruses) also hide inside your cells. They put a copy of their genes into the DNA of a cell; think of the DNA in our nucleus as a “master copy” of instructions to make everything the cell needs. We make usable copies from this master copy and feed these copied instructions into a little machine that churns out proteins (ribosomes). Sometimes, the viral DNA is copied and brought to the protein-printer, and our cells unknowingly print out new proteins that will form a new virus particle.
Because copies are made instead of tearing out DNA, the viral DNA is never removed and can keep being used to make new parts for viruses. We also have a lot of cells, so we can’t get rid of all of the ones with viral DNA because we don’t have a way to know which ones are which. And we can’t actually remove viral DNA from cells… yet. Some technologies are inspired by the abilities of viruses and can be used to make changes to your cell’s DNA, but these technologies are still expensive and not approved for medical use yet.
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