Word: decoys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Your article about the tests of a new decoy drug that relieves the common cold [MEDICINE, Oct. 13] was intriguing. If some future geneticist could produce a creature in his own likeness in the laboratory, wouldn't that scientist want to come up with a way to protect it against all the diseases of the earth? How could that be achieved...
...turns out that almost all the rhinoviruses use the same molecular doorway on the surface of the cell, a protein called ICAM-1, to gain entry to the upper-respiratory tract. Doctors have suspected since the late 1980s that if they could somehow flood the nose with decoy ICAM-1 molecules, they might be able to keep the rhinoviruses from attaching to the real thing...
...wasn't until the development of genetic engineering, however, that researchers were able to build synthetic ICAM-1 convincing enough to act as a decoy. With that in hand, Dr. Turner and his team recruited 177 volunteers who were willing to catch a cold for science. Half the volunteers (the experimental group) were sprayed with the BIRR 4 solution. The others (the control group) were given a simple saline spray. All the volunteers were deliberately infected by placing droplets of active rhinoviruses in their nasal passages...
...thirds of the control group and half the experimental group got sick. The volunteers who received the BIRR 4 spray seven hours before they were exposed fared pretty well, often reporting only a mild case of the sniffles. Even those who waited 12 hours after exposure before taking the decoy compound experienced the same protective benefits...
Still, there may well be a market for a good cold-decoy drug. Parents, for example, could take a whiff of BIRR 4 whenever their children come home from school with a cold. So could patients with severe asthma or emphysema, for whom colds can sometimes trigger a life-threatening battle for air. "It's a huge challenge to find a way to prevent colds," says Dr. Robert Couch, professor of microbiology at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. But think of the glory--and the prizes--for the scientist who finally does...