WHAT better way to kill a virus than to mutate it to death, relentlessly sabotaging its genes until it can no longer survive? If everything goes to plan, that’s the fate in store for HIV and other killers including Ebola and West Nile virus.
The tool for the job is a new class of HIV drug called a “stealth nucleoside”. The first trial of the therapy in animals began last week after a series of successful test-tube studies.
“We’re pushing the virus over the edge,” says Richard Daifuku head of Koronis Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology firm in Redmond, Washington state, which is developing stealth nucleosides.…
