Anatomy and Cell Biology 4429A Lecture : Drug Development
Document Summary
If a protein is dominantly-defective, it is hard to knock out the bad copy. In ras for example, the mutant is always on - putting a good copy of ras into cells does not fix the presence of the bad, over active copy. Must be a drug that can be shipped around the world which will help everybody get it, not just a handful of people. Viruses don"t typically make enormous proteins, so when trying to fix a gene that is large, we will have problems. A lot of retroviruses integrate wherever it"s convenient. Some viruses only infect non-dividing or dividing cells. ex. Retroviruses have single stranded rna and have an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. On the surface of the virus were envelope proteins that interacted with specific types of cells. The envelope protein determined what type of cell the virus interacted with and infected. The viral rna integrates into the host cell dna.