21. January 2009 23:04
Whether condoms or abstinence, most efforts to prevent sexually transmitted diseases have a common logic: keep the pathogen out of your body altogether.
While this approach is certainly reasonable enough, it doesn't help the countless people worldwide who, for a number of reasons, are not in a position to control their sexual circumstances.
Now, Harvard Medical School professor of pediatrics Judy Lieberman, who is also a senior investigator at the Immune Disease Institute, has overseen the development of a topical treatment that, in mice, disables key genes necessary for herpesvirus transmission. Using a laboratory method called RNA interference, or RNAi, the treatment cripples the virus in a molecular two-punch knockout, simultaneously disabling its ability to replicate, as well as the host cell's ability to take up the virus.
What's more, the treatment is just as effective when applied anywhere from one week prior to a few hours after exposure to the virus. In that sense, the basic biology of this prophylactic enables a real-world utility.
"People have been trying to make a topical agent that can prevent transmission, a microbicide, for many years," says Lieberman. "But one of the main obstacles for this is compliance. One of the attractive features of the compound we developed is that it creates in the tissue a state that's resistant to infection, even if applied up to a week before sexual exposure. This aspect has a real practicality to it. If we can reproduce these results in people, this could have a powerful impact on preventing transmission."
These findings will be published in the January 22 issue of Cell Host and Microbe.
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