Question

Researchers are designing and testing antisense drugs as therapies for a variety of diseases, including cancer, AIDS, diabetes, and muscular dystrophy. The drugs are also being tested to fight infection by deadly viruses such as Ebola. Antisense drugs consist of short RNA strands complementary in sequence to mRNAs that form during the progression of a disease. How do you think these drugs work?

Answer 1

Antisense drugs work by forming an oligonucleotide strand complementary to the mRNA of the genes which code for harmful proteins. Due to this strand, the mRNA becomes double-stranded.These double-stranded RNA's will not have the ability to be translated and hence, proteins will not be produced for the viral RNA's.

As diseases like AIDS are caused by RNA viruses, antisense drug therapy would be an effective technique to stop the viral genome from being translated.