Doctors at Cambridge have made a remarkable new discovery that could mean a cure for the common cold virus. The new discovery could also signal the end of AIDS since HIV, which causes AIDS, is also a virus.
Medical students have always been taught that the virus, which causes twice as many deaths as cancer, could not be killed once it enters the body’s cells. Therefore, the virus was believed to be immune to the body’s own defenses and to our most powerful antibiotics and anti-viral drugs.
But not any more.
A study by a team of researchers from the world-famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge has shown that this textbook explanation of the limits of the human immune system is wrong because anti-viral antibodies can in fact enter the cell with the invading virus where they are able to trigger the rapid destruction of the foreign invader.
In a dramatic breakthrough that could affect millions of lives, scientists have been able to show for the first time that the body’s immune defences can destroy the common cold virus after it has actually invaded the inner sanctum of a human cell, a feat that was believed until now to be impossible.
The discovery opens the door to the development of a new class of antiviral drugs that work by enhancing this natural virus-killing machinery of the cell. Scientists believe the first clinical trials of new drugs based on the findings could begin within two to five years.
