Question

Describe a Medical Difference or Therapeutic Target in the life cycle of retroviruses

Answer 1

Retrovirus is a RNA virus. Basically it's lifecycle passes through four stages at we have developed therapy at all these stages aiming at different targets.

Stage 1:- Target to prevent infection.

I) Fusion inhibitors: are a set of drugs prevent attachment of virus to the particular receptor (CD4) receptor

ii) In order to infect a cell virus has to fuse with Co- receptor to prevent this binding we can use receptor blockers/ receptor antagonists

Stage 2:- Reverse transcriptase inhibitors:

Reverse transcriptase is an enzyme which converts RNA to DNA to take over protein synthesis of host cell. By using reverse transcriptase inhibitors like nukes and non-nukes

Stage 3: Integrase inhibitors: Integrase is an viral enzyme helps in integrating viral DNA with host DNA at this point Integrase inhibitors helps to prevent this integration.

Stage 4:- Protiase inhibitors : protiase is an enzyme which cut's virul DNA made proteins in the host cell to a particular position, from which new virus are made. Protease inhibitor drugs malfunctions the protease and allow to make improper proteins of virus, these faulty protein made virus can't infect new cells.