Hepatitis C Cure in the Works

Researchers at the University of Florida have created  a(n admittedly small, two-step) nanomachine which can find and cleave the RNA from Hepatitis C.  It is non-toxic to the mice it was tried in and to human cultured cells as well.  This is a delightful bit of building: make “an artificial nanoparticle complex [that] can effectively mimic the function of the cellular RISC machinery for inducing target RNA cleavage” and tie it to a gold nanoparticle, the other end of which seems to be tied to the cleaving enzyme.

Obviously, this approach is expandable to other viruses than just Hep C;  many of the sequences of virulent diseases are already well-characterized enough for this process.  I won’t say Star Trek thought of it first, just because I saw most of that stuff fifty years ago and my memory isn’t that good…but I’m sure it happened.