New Tool to Figure Out What the Flu Virus Does, and What It Needs To Do It

[indigo girl]

The Editors of Effect Measure are senior public health scientists and practitioners. Paul Revere was a member of the first local Board of Health in the United States (Boston, 1799). The Editors sign their posts "Revere" to recognize the public service of a professional forerunner better known for other things.

This is could be important info. After all, we have very few useable antiviral drugs and all of them work almost the same way. The flu viruses rapidly develop resistance as seasonal H1N1 did within two years to our main antiviral, Tamiflu. Tamiflu resistance is already occurring with swine flu. Clearly, a different approach is needed.

Suppose your job is to xerox things for distribution and one day the mail room brings you an 8 x 10 business envelope addressed to "Resident, Your Town." You open it up and inside there is a set of instructions marked Urgent: do this first. There are four instructions. (1) Make a copy of the instructions. (2) For each copy go to the supply cabinet and get an 8 x 10 business envelope just like the one the instructions came in and put the copy into it. (3) Put that new copy-containing envelope in Outgoing Mail with the address "Resident, Your Town" written on it. (4) Do it again.. So you start to do this but since there is no stop command, you keep doing it and meanwhile all the rest of the necessary work of the office gets backed up and things start to go badly wrong. You use up all the paper and envelopes so there is nothing left for things the office really needs to do.

What I've just described is both what a virus does, and pretty much what a virus is: genetic material with instructions inside a protein envelope. The virus isn't alive, at least in the usual sense. It just does one thing. Hijack the host cell's xerox machine and tell it to make a copy and put it in an envelope in the outgoing mail where it will wind up in some other office and create the same kind of problem there. And so on.

What's this got to do with the Nature paper? Researchers in Germany (Berlin, Hannover, Würzburg) were thinking about a different way to attack the influenza virus. Instead of going after the virus itself, they decided to interfering with the "office tools" in your cell. Offhand that sounds like a dangerous thing, because it is attacking the host, but there are a lot of things your cells do that it can get along without for a while, either because they aren't needed all the time or there are other tools that a handy office worker can substitute or adapt for the job. There's a lot of redundancy. In other words, the strategy was to alter the host rather than the virus. If you think about it, that's just what we do when we go to bed when we are sick or put a cast or splint on an injured limb. When we are healed, we get up or take it off.

More at : http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2010/01/new_tool_to_figure_out_what_th.php