this sounds promising
MIT researchers have come up with a sweet-sounding antiviral that couples double-stranded RNA detection with caspase activation. In laymans terms, this means that if double stranded RNA, which is produced by replication viruses, and not by normal cells, is present in a cell then the 'death switch' is flipped, and the cell self-destructs and dissasembles itself. This is the forst ever broad spectrum antiviral. Ever. Way more potentially useful than the protease inhibitors for HIV (which target one enzyme produed by the virus, and to which the virus eventually develops resistance), or tamiflu, or acyclovir, all of which only work against a single or small number of viruses, and not that well at that. The thing appears to work in mice. Here's hoping it pans out in humans. I'm sure it will not prove to be the panacea for all viral diseases that it sounds like, nothing is ever as good in practice as in theory, but damn we need some better tools for viral infections, and it wouldn't take all that much for it to be better than what we have.