Antisense antivirals: future oligonucleotides-based therapeutics for viral infectious diseases

Despite the availability of antiviral chemotherapies, human pathogenic viral infections remain a global health problem, causing formidable morbidity and mortality worldwide. Of particular concern are those virus types developing (multi)drug-resistance, eg. herpesviruses, hepatitis C virus (HCV), and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), that fail almost all the available antiviral drugs in clinical practice. Novel antiviral strategy of using single-stranded antisense oligo(deoxy)nucleotides (ASOs) as gene silencers has been a prospective area of anti-infective study, which has shown great advantages in providing fast-respond postexposure therapeutics for emerging viruses. This chapter briefly introduces the important technological advances in the development of antisense antivirals (including antisense mechanism, chemical modification of ASOs), highlights the identified potential targets for different virus types and the therapeutic efficacy of ASOs that have reached clinical trials with antiviral protocols, and discusses the problems and challenges in future antiinfective application.