Pepsi, Herpes and Ribozyme - Finding A Cure
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
The Pepsi company could help a professor find a herpes cure.
Professor David C. Bloom in the department of molecular genetics and microbiology, is hoping to win a $50,000 grant to fund a treatment for herpes in the Pepsi Refresh Project .
Bloom and his team invented a new ribozyme therapy that could be used to treat herpes infections resistant to conventional drug treatments. Ribozyme, a molecule in genetic material, is intended to make the virus unable to infect and be transmitted to others.
About a million new cases of herpes occur annually. If Bloom succeeds, he would be able to stop the recurrence of herpes and fund human clinical trials for the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1).
“Our project is at a critical phase right now,” Bloom said. “We have exciting data that shows our therapy can block the HSV infection in vivo, but we need additional data on the ability of this treatment to block recurrent disease.”