Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive

by Philipp Dettmer

Think about the nature of a virus. Viruses can be attacked in two places, outside of your cells and inside of cells. If you want to attack them outside of your cells, then you basically have to attack the proteins they use to connect to the receptors of your cell. The huge, monumental problem with that, is that if you do this, you may just have created a drug that will also connect to a lot of parts inside your body. Because to connect to one of your receptors a virus needs to mimic a part of your body. A part that fulfills some sort of vital function. If you develop a drug that attacks a virus that connects to this receptor it is likely that it will target all the parts of your body that are supposed to connect to the receptor. It is the same inside your cells—we can’t make antiviral drugs that target different metabolic processes of a virus, like for example the ribosome. Because this is our ribosome the virus is using. A virus is in a perverse way very similar to us because it uses our own parts to make more of itself.