• Question: How do medical drugs work to attack viruses?

    Asked by 1234 to Kylie, Matt, Bex, RobB, Sam on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Rebecca Thompson

      Rebecca Thompson answered on 14 Jun 2016:


      What a great question!

      In a few different ways…
      1) Vaccines- these work by introducing a weak form of the virus, or something which mimics the shape of the virus, into the human body and teaches the immune system how to fight the virus. So when the person comes into contact with the virus again, the body reacts really quickly and stops the virus infection taking hold and producing symptoms.

      2) Antiviral drugs- these are a type of medicine that disrupt the viruses life cycle once an infection has begun. Basically, there are lots of different drugs that work in different ways, but they all stop more virus from being produced. Because viruses use human cells to replicate, its really hard to design these medicines without disrupting the normal working of human cells! There aren’t anti viral drugs available for all the viruses that make us ill.

      Hope that helps 🙂

    • Photo: Kylie Belchamber

      Kylie Belchamber answered on 15 Jun 2016:


      Good question 1234!
      Anti-viral drugs are not the best, as they don’t always work very well. Viruses are hard to treat, because they tend to hide inside our own cells, and hijak them to become virus producing machines! So to get to the virus, you have to kill the healthy human cell as well.
      We have a few drugs we can us:
      Aciclovir is a drug given for chicken pox and Epstein-barr virus. It work by stopping the virus making an enzyme that it needs to make DNA. The virus can then not replicate itself, because it needs to make DNA to do this. The virus will then die.
      HIV is caused by a virus, and as I’m sure you know cannot be cured at the moment. We treated HIV with drugs that stop the virus making DNA, stop the virus making proteins that it needs to package up the DNA into a new virus, stop the virus from infecting a new host cell, and stop the virus from integrating its DNA with our DNA. This should reduce the amount of infected cells, but won’t remove all the virus, we think because it can hide somewhere that we don’t know about yet!

    • Photo: Matt Dunn

      Matt Dunn answered on 15 Jun 2016:


      We have lots of great drugs to attack and destroy bacteria, but viruses are much harder to deal with due to their ability to change every time you are infected with them (such as the common cold).

      The important thing to note is that viruses use our own cells to replicate, they go into the cell and force it to make many copies of the virus, then they all burst out and infect other cells, and the cycle continues. If you wanted a successful drug to stop viruses infecting you, it may have to target your own cells, which is too risky for a treatment.

      But now that we can work out the full genetic sequence for viruses, it is a lot easier to develop very specific drugs that stop the viruses from doing certain things, for instance if you stop a virus from being able to go into our cells, then they cannot produce more viruses and the infection quickly fades 🙂

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