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Find out more about Diamond's response to virus research.
The national newspapers have picked up on some exciting new virus inhibitor research that could be the basis of drugs to treat hand, foot and mouth disease, polio and the common cold. See articles from the Express and Metro.
This discovery, published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, may also have important implications for combating other diseases. Hand, foot and mouth disease is caused by several closely related viruses, and the new compound is effective against all of these. In addition, other wide-spread viruses are quite closely related (they belong to the same enterovirus genus), including poliovirus and many of the viruses responsible for the common cold.
The new drug treatment, which so far has been tested only in isolated cells, was created using cutting edge techniques. Structure-based drug design refers to drug treatments that are specifically designed to target the structure of a disease; it works in three stages. Firstly the pathogen’s structure must be solved. Secondly, scientists must determine how that structure relates to the functioning of the pathogen. Finally, they can develop a means of interacting with that structure to disable the pathogen.
The Anglo-Chinese collaboration used two of Diamond’s life science beamlines, I03 and I24, to develop the new methodology. When they determined the virus structure in 2012, the team saw a small pocket inside the virus where a drug might fit. They have now developed a potential drug molecule that can sit inside this pocket, where it locks the virus rigid, preventing it breaking open and releasing its RNA.
Professor Nicola Stonehouse, from the University of Leeds' Faculty of Biological Sciences, said: "Hand foot and mouth disease is an emerging problem and is currently untreatable. We are very hopeful that this research offers us a hand hold in fighting this virus, but it also may have much wider benefits in creating therapeutics to fight related diseases such as the common cold. Big problems like these need large teams to tackle them and this research brought together a formidable team from across the world. This approach could be key to designing and validating the drugs of the future"
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