There was a cold medicine - the most difficult disease in the world

For thousands of years, some of the most common methods we use when we have a cold are taking medication for symptoms, taking vitamin C supplements, eating chicken porridge and sleeping more than usual. Because there is no specific medicine, we can only wait until the disease resolves.

According to Futurism, in an article published in the recent scientific journal Nature Chemistry, researchers at the Royal College of London (ICL) said they have successfully developed a new molecule that works as well. Cold medicine.

It is known that the object of this type of molecule is not the symptoms of colds and even the viruses that cause illness, but the cells in our bodies who "betray" when we have a cold.

So far, colds are thought to be relatively difficult to treat because the cause can come from hundreds of different viruses. According to an expert, a treatment may work with one strain but not the other. One more worrying thing is that these viruses are constantly evolving, causing scientists a headache. Even if they have found a way to treat a virus strain, they will definitely change until treatment is no longer effective.

Colds are the most common disease in the world but difficult to cure.

At the present time, we have not been able to completely cure colds but can only relieve symptoms. Even if we want to get rid of the disease quickly, we have to wait for the immune system to handle the virus that has no other way to affect it.

Therefore, ICL's team decided to approach in a completely different aspect of the problem: If it is impossible to destroy all the cold viruses that have appeared and latent viruses, we can probably make them The human body becomes an ideal environment for those viruses to exist.

When the cold virus invades the body, it controls a human protein cell called N- myristoyltransferase (NMT) . The NMT protein is an important component of the cells that every cold virus often tries to take in order to multiply and develop throughout the body. In addition, the cold virus uses this same protein to make a capsid - a type of virus protection that can be replicated.

From the approach of NMT protein, the ICL team developed molecular IMP-1088 capable of completely blocking some rhinovirus strains - the main cause of common cold.

The molecule IMP-1088 (yellow) "blocks" NMT protein (blue) causing the virus to cause colds that cannot exist and develop in the human body.

In addition, they also revealed that their bigger goal is to target a group of people who might be in danger just because of a cold like an asthma patient or a lung problem. For these subjects, if a cold can only be managed with a long-term symptomatic medication, it will worsen the inherent disease, such as stimulating deadly asthma attacks.

Scientists say this is not the first attempt to treat colds by focusing on human cells. The problem is that all previous methods have been shown to contain toxins and affect cells in the body. To date, in experiments performed on human cells in the laboratory, IMP-1088 has shown that it has no negative impact on cells. Therefore, the team hopes to test IMP-1088 soon in animals and then a clinical trial on humans.

If successful, cold medicine is expected to be produced in the form of inhalers similar to asthma medications.