Cullen is of the opinion that viruses may be coaxed out of hiding by blocking such microRNAs, and then to treat patients with drugs that stamp out herpes in epithelial cells, such as acyclovir.
"Every virus that pops out gets killed," New Scientist magazine quoted Cullen as saying in a study report published in the journal Nature.
However, Patricia Spear, a virologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, thinks that this approach may prove troublesome because waking a virus seems to sacrifice the infected nerve cell
"You would be inducing replication of virus in the neuron and the question is how many neurons you want to kill off," she says.
Source-ANI
RAS/M