Research findings provide new avenues to target virus infection

Viral infection is one of the leading medical challenges of the 21st Century, ranging from the Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) epidemic affecting 3% of the global population, to recent outbreaks of West Nile, Zika, and Ebola viruses. Viruses are parasites that lack the basic metabolic machinery needed to replicate. To get around this problem, they hijack the metabolic machinery of their hosts in order to complete their lifecycle and propagate. However, scientists still don’t have a good understanding of the metabolic interplay between viruses and the organisms they infect. This is mainly due to the complex interplay between human genes and metabolic processes. Now, in new research appearing in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, an international research group led by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem systematically identified an array of genetic switches that controls the metabolic response to Hepatitis C Virus infection. By carefully selecting drugs that target these genetic switches, the researchers...