Development of Artificial Virus Leads to Improved Pharmaceuticals

 Researchers from Wageningen UR and the University of Leiden have successfully developed a artificial virus. This virus can possibly be used for the delivery of new generations of pharmaceuticals by packaging them and delivering them to diseased cells. Also, the artificial virus may be used in gene therapy.




Normally, pharmaceuticals consist of relatively small molecules that end up at their desired location without much trouble. Newer drugs, however, consist of large biomolecules such as DNA and proteins. These biomolecules must be delivered completely intact to be successful, but DNA is incapable of this. Therefore, many natural, made harmless viruses have been used as vectors to deliver genetic material. However, the process of making viruses harmless has a lot of room for improvement, as it is difficult to package individual DNA molecules precisely with a protective coat of smaller molecules. Up until now, packaging DNA molecules with a protective coating of DNA molecules had not been achieved.

To develop this artificial virus, researchers decided to design and produce artificial virus coat proteins, using the natural machinery of yeast cells. When the translated proteins were mixed with DNA, they automatically formed a highly protective protein coat around each DNA molecule, thus creating artificial viruses.

This generation of artificial viruses was found to be as effective as the current methods of delivering DNA to host cells. The artificial viruses, however, offer a more precise way of packaging DNA, which could possibly lead to better methods more delivering new generations of pharmaceticals and possibly be used in gene therapy

Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140828110636.htm

Related Article: http://www.biotechdaily.com/lab_technologies/articles/294754498/synthetic_virus_designed_to_enhance_delivery_of_new_generation_of_pharmaceutical_agents.html