Viral Manipulation - Altering the Code

Researchers are learning to alter viruses' genes to make them less elusive.

What makes the flu so hard for scientists to catch--and easy for the rest of us to catch--is that the virus responsible for the flu has a maddeningly fabulous way of constantly changing.

Every year a slightly different influenza strain emerges for battle. So even though the human immune system can learn to fight one strain, there's always a new one coming that, by being slightly different, eludes defenses. And some years, a very uncommon strain arrives with elements the immune system has never seen before and mayhem ensues.

This, of course, is one of those years. A flu strain made up of components from swine, birds and humans, called H1N1, began infecting humans early this year. It is taking a worldwide breather now, as the Southern Hemisphere flu season winds down, but it is sure to return in some form or another for the Northern Hemisphere flu season sometime over the next several months.

But researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have turned the tables on the influenza virus and attacked it in a way that neutralizes one of its biggest weapons, its ability to mix and match components to create new strains.

"We've outsmarted mother nature," says Peter Palese, head of Mount Sinai's Microbiology Department and an author of a recent paper describing this research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We've made a virus that can't do this anymore."

How exactly this new trick can be used to fight the flu is still unclear. It could be used to make improved vaccines, ones, perhaps, that have no chance of mixing with other types of flu virus. In the meantime, it gives researchers important insight into how viruses behave and the tools for manipulating them.

Peter, Pa-lese. Mount Sinai? Wiki: According to Bedouin tradition, this is the mountain where God gave laws to the Israelites. I'm guessing this is referring to the fact that H1N1 is manmade ("outwitting mother nature") and this is a conditioning piece to tell people that we can already create viruses, in case they somehow didn't know already.

But what if Palese or others could prevent all this shuffling by repopulating the world with a new strain of flu, one that was engineered to not be able to reassort? That way, maybe our immune system could deal with the flu once and for all. Turns out that idea is science fiction, replete with the threat of a grisly ending for mankind.

"Intellectually, I like the idea that we could seed such a virus into nature and make sure that it replaces all the other ones," says Palese. "But we'd have to make the virus much better than the ones we already have and I'm not sure we'd want that one around. It would be too dangerous."

Looks like they're hard at work creating a flu virus that no one can avoid catching.

As much as I dislike using a vague "they", as I have in the last post and in this one, I think we all know who/what I'm referring to.