Changing the Global Approach to Medicine, Volume 2

Today’s medical approach to treating a disease is to flood the body with a medication in an effort to deliver a drug or protein to the cells that would either benefit from treatment or be terminated by the action of the treatment. Medications are introduced through an oral route, by infusion, injection, sniffed up the nose, absorption through a dermal patch or deposited rectally. Essentially this might be referred to as the Whole Body Approach to medical care. Unfortunately, all too often, this Whole Body Approach generates undesirable side effects. While the Whole Body Approach generally delivers a medication to all of the cells comprising the body, usually only a single cell type is actually the target of the medical therapy.

A Cell Specific Approach, which delivers a medical therapy only to the cells in need of treatment, would be expected to increase the medical therapy’s effectiveness and lower the incidence of side effects.

In nature viruses utilize a Cell Specific Approach to deliver genetic material and support proteins to specific cells that act as the host for a particular virus for the purpose of replicating the virus. Understanding the construction, behavior and life-cycle of viruses offers a platform upon which a Cell Specific Approach medical treatment strategy can be devised.

Volume 1 of this series discussed the Human Immunodeficiency Virus in detail. The initial objective of the first book was to explore means to defeat HIV by understanding how the virus was constructed and deriving treatment strategies to neutralize the HIV virion based on this knowledge. Studying HIV led to the recognition that viruses carry more than DNA as their payload. Some viruses, such as HIV and Hepatitis C, carry RNA as well as support proteins as their payload. The study of Hepatitis C led to realizing that viral genomes do not have to utilize the biologic machinery of the nucleus of a host cell in order to generate copies of the virus.

Understanding that the nucleus of a cell could be bypassed and that a virus’s payload could act independent of the nucleus of a cell led to exploring RNA therapy as its own entity. Recognizing that some viruses carry support proteins to assist their genome in being utilized, led to the concept that viruses could carry medically beneficial proteins to specific cells to produce therapeutic effects. Further, if viruses can carry proteins, they should be able to carry reasonably sized chemical molecules and nutrients. Modifying viruses and incorporating them to carry chemical molecules and proteins to specific cell types draws the medical profession closer to achieving a very effective broad spectrum Cell Specific Approach to medical care.

Medical Vector Therapy, introduced here in Volume 2 of the series, describes a Cell Specific Approach to medical care that not only takes advantage of the fact that the payload of a virus can be changed, but that the surface probes can be altered. Such a device is referred to as a vector, which leads to the concept Medical Vector Therapy. By modifying the surface probes, a virus-like transport device can be configured to deliver its payload to any cell-type in the body. Medical Vector Therapy offers a practical means of achieving a Cell Specific Approach to delivering medical therapy. Such a Cell Specific Approach provides the means to treat a body with smaller, more exact doses of a particular medical therapy delivered to specific target cells and to improve the effect of the treatment, while at the same time reducing the occurrence of side effects.