Designing Defenses against Deadly Viruses

Viruses are curious life forms. Minimalistic and yet equipped with the evolvability to persist and proliferate, there’s clearly a lesson or two to be learned from them on survival. It is perhaps these very intrinsic qualities that have transformed some viruses into the deadliest known pathogens in the history of mankind. A viral epidemic has been the focus of many summer blockbuster movies, wherein identification, structural characterization, and the development of antibodies to ‘‘cure’’ the infection are all amazingly achieved within a matter of hours (and often by the one scientist-doctor-chemist-physicist-macho-hero, but more on that some other time). Such alacrity is desirable but perhaps not very realistic. What is truly exciting, however, is the level of insight that a number of recent studies have provided into how these deadly viruses hijack host defenses and how newer classes of drugs could protect if not potentially cure infection altogether.