BREAKTHROUGH! Boston Researchers Identify New Target For Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Treatment That Can Be Used For Corvid-19 Coronavirus.
Source: Thailand Medical News Feb 13, 2020 4 years, 8 months, 4 weeks, 17 hours, 34 minutes ago
The
covid-19 coronavirus outbreak has shown that
viruses are a constant threat to humanity. We have been through Ebola, Zika, SARS and MERS episodes but have yet to build up an arsenal of drugs and vaccines that can have a broad-spectrum effect on
viruses from specific classes or families.
Though vaccines are regularly developed and deployed against specific
viruses, the process takes a lot of time, and does not help everyone who needs immediate protection, plus it still leaves individuals exposed and vulnerable to new outbreaks and new viruses as they emerge.
Medical and genomic researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered a new potential
antiviral drug target that could lead to treatments protecting against a host of infectious diseases to the point of creating a pan, or universal, treatment that can also be used agains the
coronavirus.
The medical and genomic researchers have uncovered that the protein
Argonaute 4 (
AGO4) is an "Achilles heel" for
viruses.
The
AGO4 is one of a family of
AGO proteins. Till now, there has been little evidence or understanding of why they are important or critical on the cellular level.The medical and genomic researchers, led by Dr Kate L. Jeffrey, PhD, and her collaborators found that
AGO4 plays a key role protecting cells against viral infections.
It was observed that specifically, this protein is uniquely
antiviral in mammalian immune cells.
The researchers studied the
anti-viral effects of several
Argonaute proteins, and found that only cells that were deficient in
AGO4 were "hyper-susceptible" to viral infection. In other words, low levels of
AGO4 make mammalian cells more likely to become infected.
This findings of the research was published by Cell Reports.
The medical researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital suggest that boosting levels of
AGO4 could shore up the immune system to protect against multiple
viruses including the
coronaviruses.
Dr Jeffrey Told
Thailand Medical News,"The goal is to understand how our immune system works so we can create treatments that work against a range of
viruses, rather than just vaccines against a particular one."
Typically, mammals have four
Argonaute proteins (1-4), which act by silencing genes and which are remarkably conserved throughout multiple living things, including plants. These are RNAi and microRNA effector proteins and RNAi is the major antiviral defense strategy in plants and invertebrates. Studies of influenza infected mice have shown that
AGO4-deficient animals have significantly higher levels of the
virus.
Dr Jeffrey added, “The next
steps are to determine how broad spectrum this is to any
virus type. Then we need to discover how to boost
AGO4 to ramp up protection against viral infections."
The researchers are confident that the protocol would work against the
coronavirus as initial lab studies have already demonstrated that it works and are next planning testing on animal models before moving on to actual human clinical trials.
Journal Reference: Fatemeh Adiliaghdam, Megha Basavappa, Tahnee L. Saunders, Dewi Harjanto, John T. Prior, D. Alexander Cronkite, Nina Papavasiliou, Kate L. Jeffrey. A Requirement for Argonaute 4 in Mammalian Antiviral Defense. Cell Reports, 2020; 30 (6): 1690 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.01.021
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