Posted: 6/13/2019
I had drafted this blog post about 5 years ago, but never got around to follow up on it.
Today (6/13/19), I read another promising article about vulnerabilities of a large class of pathogenic viruses, i.e. Picornavirus, which cause a number of diseases like the common cold, meningitis, encephalitis and polio and much more: New vulnerability found in major human viruses
“Although Picornavirus have been studied for decades, the authors discovered a previously unknown pocket, or indentation, on the surface of the virus, in which the compound had lodged, thereby stabilizing it against the kind of shape change that would allow interaction with host cells.”
Let’s hope this indentation is not mutated very often!
“They performed cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) of the drug-virus complex to determine how the drug exerted its effect. Cryo-EM involves combining thousands of two-dimensional images to develop a highly detailed three-dimensional image of the target.”
This cryo-electron microscopy seems to one of the new, very powerful tools in medicine and biology. We will probably learn a lot more in the coming months and years!
Five years ago, I read here titled “The Nastiest of the Cold Viruses Reveals Its True Form”. Meanwhile, there were other promising research results, but still no cure!
Will mankind rid the world from the common cold in the foreseeable future? It is high time and long overdue!
Compared with the successful defeat of AIDS/HIV it has taken way too long to rid humanity of influenza or the common cold!
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