Silencing viruses with RNA

摘要

Until recently, the two major ways to combat viral infections were vaccines and drugs that are targeted to specific viral enzymes or other viral proteins. Papers on pages 430 and 435 of this issue, and another published earlier this month in Nature Medicine, provide a significant new strategy―one that targets viral genomes and the messenger RNA molecules they encode. Each of these papers makes use of a revolutionary new technology, RNA interference (RNAi), which prevents the expression of genes by using small RNA molecules, such as 'small interfering RNAs' (siRNAs). This technology in turn takes advantage of the fact that RNAi is a natural biological mechanism for silencing genes in most, if not all, cells of many living organisms, from plants to insects to mammals. The idea is that RNAi prevents a gene from producing a functional protein by ensuring that the molecular intermediate―the messenger RNA (mRNA) copy of the gene―is destroyed.