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Flu News for Senior Citizens
Maybe Anti-Flu Protection can be Delivered in a
Cocktail to Prevent Even Bird Flu
Peptide blocks flu virus from entering
cells, thwarting its ability to replicate
 October 5, 2006 – With most senior citizens facing
a flu shot in the near future, they may appreciate the work of
researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that say they have
discovered a novel compound that offers broad protection against
influenza viruses, including deadly avian influenza. Here's the best
part – this protection may be delivered in an anti-influenza cocktail,
rather than with a needle.
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FLU 2005-06 |
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The new research, reported online this week in the
Journal of Virology, describes the discovery of a peptide -- a small
protein molecule -- that effectively blocks the influenza virus from
attaching to and entering the cells of its host, thwarting its ability
to replicate and infect more cells.
The new finding is important because it could make
available a class of new antiviral drugs to prevent and treat influenza
at a time when fear of a global pandemic is heightened and available
antiviral drugs are losing their potency.
"This gives us another tool," says Stacey
Schultz-Cherry, a UW-Madison professor of medical microbiology and
immunology and the senior author of the new report. "We're quickly
losing our antivirals."
The new drug, which was tested on cells in culture
and in mice, conferred complete protection against infection and was
highly effective in treating animals in the early stages of infection.
Untreated infected animals typically died within a week. All of the
infected animals treated with small doses of the drug at the onset of
symptoms survived.
"Pretreatment with (the peptide) provided 100
percent protection against numerous subtypes (of flu), including the
highly pathogenic H5N1 viruses...," according to the Journal of Virology
report.
The new drug, known as "entry blocker," is a
fragment of a larger human protein whose role in biology is to help
things pass through membranes such as those that encapsulate cells.
Although the peptide's precise mechanism for
thwarting flu remains to be deciphered, it seems to work by blocking the
virus' ability to latch onto a key cell surface molecule that the virus
uses to get inside cells. To survive and reproduce, viruses must gain
access to cells where they make new infectious particles to infect yet
more cells in a cascade of infection.
The scientific team emphasized that while the new
drug shows great promise, much work remains to determine optimal dosage,
efficacy and safety before the drug can be tested in a human patient.
One possibility is that the new agent could be used as part of an
anti-influenza cocktail of drugs, much like those used to treat HIV
infection. The team hopes to move the research into preclinical phase as
quickly as possible.
Currently, there are a few effective antiviral
medications on the market for influenza, but they are beginning to show
signs that they are losing their effectiveness, and scientists and
health professionals worry that the flu virus, and especially the H5N1
bird flu virus, will evolve to the point where existing drugs are no
longer effective. Drugs now on the market work by either preventing
virus replication within the cell or preventing the release of viruses
from the cell.
The peptide found by the Wisconsin group seems to
work in an entirely different way.
"It attacks a completely different part of the
virus life cycle," explains Curtis R. Brandt, a co-author of the study
and a UW-Madison professor of medical microbiology and immunology and of
ophthalmology and visual sciences. "The virus can't even get into the
cell. The peptide is blocking the very earliest step in infection."
Antiviral drugs are considered to be a critical
line of defense in the event of an influenza epidemic or pandemic.
Vaccines are the most important defense, but new vaccines must be
customized in response to an outbreak of disease and it can take as long
as a year to formulate and manufacture vaccine in quantity. Antiviral
drugs, it is anticipated, would be used to buy time to produce a vaccine
in the event of a flu pandemic.
And one intriguing possibility, the Wisconsin
scientists add, is that the drug might be able to help stimulate an
immune response to flu as the peptide failed to block all of the virus
particles in their experiments. A few persistent virus particles, while
not enough to make a patient sick, could give the immune system the
viral template it needs to mount an effective response, just like a
vaccine.
The flu-thwarting qualities of the peptide were
observed after similar peptides were found by Brandt and his colleagues
to stop herpes simplex virus infection.
Editor's Notes:
The Wisconsin work was supported by grants from the
UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health Education and Research
Committee, the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency.
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