Do Viruses Help? Essay, Research Paper

HOW ABOUT VIRUSES?

Just like bacteria viruses are one of the microbes that are winning the match against the humans. Viruses were the toughest one to tackle for the scientist. The shape, contents and their protective shields were the most challenging part of the fight. There are many ways one can treat cancer, but for AIDS doctors prescribe a cocktail of drugs in which some are enzyme inhibitors, protein inhibitors and while some are RNA inhibitors. This is not it in the cocktail there is more to the list. As the technology increases and the knowledge of our scientist about the DNA, RNA, Viruses, Bacteria, and other interesting things we are a step closer to the destruction of the virus.

The hardest part of the virus is that it mutates a lot. Just like bacteria viruses do get resistant to drugs we take against them. For example if one catches cold or flu the doctors prescribe Amoxicycilin or something similar to it. If the patient doesn’t finish the dosage there is a likelihood for the cold virus to get resistant to Amoxicycilin resulting a second drug intake. Pharmaceutical industries are trying to take a new approach to make antiviral drugs. One recently developed shows remarkable effects on the herpes virus. The recent antiviral drug indirectly attacks the virus making it hard for the virus to develop resistance to. Until today what the antiviral drugs did was they interfered with the production of the essential protein by the viruses. Viruses are also denoted as parasites, meaning that they infect a host as its life support.

To fight the war against the viruses University of Pennsylvania Medical Center researches took the herpes simplex virus for experimental purpose, they found out that by inhibiting certain set of cellular enzymes they can successfully stop all the viral activity which causes the host to become sick. “These enzymes are called cyclin-dependent kinases, or cdks. This enzyme along with other enzymes drive and coordinate cell division.” This enzyme is also used by other viruses for replication purposes thus what Penn. team did was they too the cdks inhibitor and infected the virus with it, the result that came out was that the cells didn’t replicate and the host cells were healthy.

According to the statistics Herpes Simplex Virus 1 and Herpes Simplex Virus 2 strains have infected 80% and 20% respectively, the remarkable thing is that these cdks inhibitors work best on these two strains of HSV. Along with these two strains of HSV there is a third strain called Human CytoMegloVirus or HCMV which infects also 80% of the people, the cdks inhibitors shut this virus down for good. Tests are going to be conducted on the HIV, adenovirus, papovavirus, and parvovirus with the cdks inhibitors for these viruses work almost the same as HSV.

If this drug works there might be a possibility for the people who have one of these viruses to be cured with one pill or with a cocktail in which one more pill is added to it. But the fight against viruses is not easy to win for they are just more complicated than what we think it is. I learned that human race has still one more chance to survive for few more years. Before I read this article I thought that just like dinosaurs were extinct we are going to be too. But the only difference will be that they didn’t know their reason of what caused the wiping of their race but we will Viruses.