AS DENGUE fever struck Buenos Aires in Argentina for the first time this week, there is renewed hope that a drug to treat the 100 million people infected worldwide each year may one day be possible.
Mariano Garcia-Blanco of , North Carolina, and colleagues used RNA interference technology to 鈥渒nock down鈥� the activity of a gene in a fruit fly cell before exposing it to the dengue virus to assess the impact of this gene on infection. By repeating the experiment on each of the fruit fly鈥檚 14,000 genes, they identified more than 100 genes necessary for infection to occur (Nature, ).
Further testing found that inhibiting 42 of the equivalent human genes stopped dengue fever from infecting human cells, suggesting targets for drug treatment. The team also identified a gene necessary for dengue fever to infect its host, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, potentially leading to new ways to prevent transmission.
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