The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 20 percent of Americans carry the herpes virus, which is a sneaky little bugger that can hide itself so well you might not even know you have it. But researchers are looking at a way to flush it into the open where it can be killed.
It may be possible to “wake up” the virus and then kill it with standard antiviral drugs such as acyclovir, said Jennifer Lin Umbach of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on the study released Wednesday.
“We are trying to go into animal trials,” Umbach said in a telephone interview.
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A drug that would turn off the microRNAs could drive the virus out of hiding and allow all copies of the virus to be killed with acyclovir, she said.
“You would have one cold sore but you would get rid of it,” she said. Curing something more painful, such as shingles, might be a little trickier, she added.
One class of drug called an antagomir might work, Umbach said. These chemically engineered oligonucleotides are short segments of RNA that can be made into mirror images of a targeted bit of genetic material — such as the herpes microRNAs. They would attach and “silence” the microRNA.
