Using viruses to make new medicines
Viruses and bacteria don’t have the friendliest reputations. As far as we humans are concerned, we do everything we can to avoid coming into contact with certain types so that we don’t get sick—but what if clever use of viruses and bacteria could be used to make new medicines to treat sickness instead?
Two of the winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, biochemists George Smith and Sir Gregory Winter, found ways to use nature’s evolutionary processes to make new proteins (much like fellow prize winner, Frances Arnold, who used directed evolution to create new enzymes). Those methods led to the development of new medicinal treatments, all thanks to something called ‘phage display’.
