DRACO is a group of experimental antiviral drug

Antiviral drug

Antiviral drugs are a class of medication used specifically for treating viral infections. Like antibiotics for bacteria, specific antivirals are used for specific viruses...

s under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

. DRACO is reported to have broad-spectrum efficacy against many infectious viruses, including Dengue flavivirus

Dengue virus

Dengue virus in one of four serotypes is the cause of dengue fever. It is a mosquito-borne single positive-stranded RNA virus of the family Flaviviridae; genus Flavivirus...

, Amapari and Tacaribe Arenavirus

Arenavirus

Arenavirus is a genus of virus that infects rodents and occasionally humans. At least eight Arenaviruses are known to cause human disease. The diseases derived from Arenaviruses range in severity. Aseptic meningitis, a severe human disease that causes inflammation covering the brain and spinal...

, Guama bunyavirus

Bunyaviridae

Bunyaviridae is a family of negative-stranded RNA viruses. Though generally found in arthropods or rodents, certain viruses in this family occasionally infect humans. Some of them also infect plants....

, H1N1 influenza and rhinovirus

Rhinovirus

Human rhinoviruses are the most common viral infective agents in humans and are the predominant cause of the common cold. Rhinovirus infection proliferates in temperatures between 33–35 °C , and this may be why it occurs primarily in the nose...

. DRACO is reported to induce rapid apoptosis

Apoptosis

Apoptosis is the process of programmed cell death that may occur in multicellular organisms. Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes and death. These changes include blebbing, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, and chromosomal DNA fragmentation...

 selectively in virus-infected mammalian cells, while leaving uninfected cells unharmed.

Mechanism

DRACO is selective for virus-infected cells. Differentiation between infected and healthy cells is made primarily via the length and type of RNA transcription helices present within the cell. Most viruses produce long dsRNA helices during transcription and replication. In contrast, uninfected mammalian cells generally produce dsRNA helices of less than 24 base pairs during transcription.
Cell death is effected via one of the last steps in the apoptosis pathway in which complexes containing intracellular apoptosis signaling molecules simultaneously bind multiple procaspases

Caspase

Caspases, or cysteine-aspartic proteases or cysteine-dependent aspartate-directed proteases are a family of cysteine proteases that play essential roles in apoptosis , necrosis, and inflammation....

. The procaspases transactivate via cleavage, activate additional caspases in the cascade, and cleave a variety of cellular proteins, thereby killing the cell.