HCMV Antivirals and Strategies to Target the Latent Reservoir.
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Publication Date
2021-05-01Journal Title
Viruses
ISSN
1999-4915
Publisher
MDPI AG
Volume
13
Issue
5
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Physical Medium
Electronic
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Perera, M. R., Wills, M., & Sinclair, J. (2021). HCMV Antivirals and Strategies to Target the Latent Reservoir.. Viruses, 13 (5) https://doi.org/10.3390/v13050817
Abstract
Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a ubiquitous human herpesvirus. In healthy people, primary infection is generally asymptomatic, and the virus can go on to establish lifelong latency in cells of the myeloid lineage. However, HCMV often causes severe disease in the immunosuppressed: transplant recipients and people living with AIDS, and also in the immunonaive foetus. At present, there are several antiviral drugs licensed to control HCMV disease. However, these are all faced with problems of poor bioavailability, toxicity and rapidly emerging viral resistance. Furthermore, none of them are capable of fully clearing the virus from the host, as they do not target latent infection. Consequently, reactivation from latency is a significant source of disease, and there remains an unmet need for treatments that also target latent infection. This review briefly summarises the most common HCMV antivirals used in clinic at present and discusses current research into targeting the latent HCMV reservoir.
Keywords
Humans, Cytomegalovirus, Cytomegalovirus Infections, Disease Susceptibility, Antiviral Agents, Organ Transplantation, Disease Reservoirs, Virus Latency, Virus Activation, Drug Development
Sponsorship
This research was funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Programme Grant
(grant number MR/S00081X/1) and an MRC Doctoral Training grant to M.R.P. (grant number
RG86932).
Funder references
Medical Research Council (MR/S00081X/1)
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/v13050817
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/322002
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