Cures from the sea
The wonders of the marine world don't cease to amaze. The latest is a yellow coral, Isis hippuris, collected off the coast of Okinawa island of Japan. The coral has yielded a compound that can slow down and possibly prevent virus replication and also treat cancer.
Biochemist Jerry Pelletier of McGill University in Canada and his colleagues isolated a natural steroid, called hippuristanol, after grinding the coral and treating it with methanol. The scientists then tested the steroid on poliovirus and found it slowed down viral replication. The study appeared in Nature Chemical Biology (Vol 2, No 4, April, 2006).
Antibiotics and other modern medicines do not work on viruses because these organisms infiltrate cells and hijack their processes. Such a hijacker virus uses cellular machinery to control the process of building proteins and thereby replicates itself. Hippuristanol stops this process by inhibiting the function of a protein
Related Content
- Order of the Supreme Court of India regarding drugs for treatment of rare diseases, 05/12/2022
- Summary for policymakers of the thematic assessment of the sustainable use of wild species
- Order of the Delhi High Court regarding permission to avail “Human Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy”, 15/04/2019
- Order of the National Green Tribunal regarding pollution in river Mandovi, Goa, 20/02/2019
- South Asia's hotspots: impacts of temperature and precipitation changes on living standards
- Global report on trends in prevalence of tobacco smoking 2000-2025