The Key To Curing The Common Cold Could Lurk Within Our Own Cells
“Our approach is a little bit different than the regular antiviral approach where you directly target viral proteins,” says study senior author Jan E. Carette, a Stanford University microbiologist. Conventional therapies try to destroy viruses by targeting their proteins, which they need to live. But the pathogens need our proteins, too: they proliferate by injecting their DNA into host cells. Different viruses need different proteins to complete this process. Carette and his colleagues used CRISPR-Cas9 to screen the whole human genome, looking for a protein that all enteroviruses depend on to replicate....