"Please come soon!"
The common cold, we’ve all had it plenty of times. It is the most frequent infectious disease in humans with an average two to four infections a year in adults, and yet there is no cure for it (right now). But a recent landmark discovery by researchers at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge has found that our bodies can fight viruses not only outside of cells, but inside of them too (which is where virus infections take place).
“In any immunology textbook you will read that once a virus makes it into a cell, that is game over because the cell is now infected. At that point there is nothing the immune response can do other than kill that cell,” said Leo James, who led the research team.
But studies at the Medical Research Council’s laboratory have found that the antibodies produced by the immune system, which recognise and attack invading viruses, actually ride piggyback into the inside of a cell with the invading virus.
Once inside the cell, the presence of the antibody is recognised by a naturally occurring protein in the cell called TRIM21 which in turn activates a powerful virus-crushing machinery that can eliminate the virus within two hours – long before it has the chance to hijack the cell to start making its own viral proteins. “This is the last opportunity a cell gets because after that it gets infected and there is nothing else the body can do but kill the cell,” Dr James said.
The research is still in its early days and it will take years of work and testing before new drugs based on the findings will become available. Once that happens though… imagine how much better your life will be without suffering from colds. And how much more can be achieved without all that downtime.
- Hi C
