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New Drug Could Cure Nearly Any Viral Infection

Posted by samzenpus on from the universal-cure dept.

HardYakka writes "A team of researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory have designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection. The researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever."

3 of 414 comments (clear)

  1. HIV? by webmistressrachel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Any news on HIV / AIDS? Strange that that isn't the first virus threw into the petri dish with this stuff, to be honest.

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    1. Re:HIV? by digitalderbs · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm a biophysicist that works on the flu--though not a virologist--and I'd like to mention a couple of related points. First, as another poster had stated, this does not only work for double-stranded RNA viruses. Look at table 1. The influenza virus and HIV are both very similar--class I enveloped viruses with single-stranded RNA genomes. I'd imagine this could have some effect toward HIV, as it is effective with the flu. However, it would appear that once the HIV RNA has been reverse-transcribed to cDNA and integrated into the genome, then the approach presented in this paper would not work--i.e. if you have AIDS, this won't help you.

  2. Re:It's called Kalocin. by HungryHobo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How useful is Penicillin these days?

    still fairly useful.Not as useful as it used to be but still good.

    How much worse is MRSA compared to the weaker infections that people used to get?

    no worse. it's just that we've become so accustomed to antibiotics working insanely well that when a handful of bugs become resistant they seem far scarier than their ancestors despite being no more deadly.

    It's hard to comprehend how deadly bacterial infections were before Penicillin. Getting just a taste of it in the form of MRSA only seems scarier relative to how thing have been since penicillin.