Therapeutic Interfering Particles Exploiting Viral Replication and Assembly Mechanisms Show Promising Performance: A Modelling Study

TL;DR

This modeling study proposes a design for therapeutic interfering RNAs that exploit viral assembly mechanisms, showing high efficacy in controlling RNA viral infections like hepatitis C.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel tiRNA design targeting viral assembly signals, demonstrating its potential effectiveness through intracellular modeling of hepatitis C virus.

Findings

Small improvements in tiRNA assembly and replication efficiency yield over 99% treatment efficacy.

The proposed tiRNA strategy could be a promising antiviral treatment.

Modeling confirms the feasibility of exploiting viral assembly for therapy.

Abstract

Defective interfering particles arise spontaneously during a viral infection as mutants lacking essential parts of the viral genome. Their ability to replicate in the presence of the wild-type (WT) virus (at the expense of viable viral particles) is mimicked and exploited by therapeutic interfering particles. We propose a strategy for the design of therapeutic interfering RNAs (tiRNAs) against positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses that assemble via packaging signal-mediated assembly. These tiRNAs contain both an optimised version of the virus assembly manual that is encoded by multiple dispersed RNA packaging signals and a replication signal for viral polymerase, but lack any protein coding information. We use an intracellular model for hepatitis C viral (HCV) infection that captures key aspects of the competition dynamics between tiRNAs and viral genomes for virally produced capsid protein and polymerase. We show that only a small increase in the assembly and replication efficiency of the tiRNAs compared with WT virus is required in order to achieve a treatment efficacy greater than 99%. This demonstrates that the proposed tiRNA design could be a promising treatment option for RNA viral infections.