Game over? Not so fast, say socialist British scientists

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Viruses are still mankind's biggest killers, responsible for twice as many deaths as cancer, essentially because they can get inside cells where they can hide away from the body's immune defences and the powerful antibiotic drugs that have proved invaluable against bacterial infections.

However, 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 any immunology textbook you will read that once a virus makes it into a cell, that is game over because the cell is now infected. At that point there is nothing the immune response can do other than kill that cell," said Leo James, who led the research team.

But studies at the Medical Research Council's laboratory have found that the antibodies produced by the immune system, which recognise and attack invading viruses, actually ride piggyback into the inside of a cell with the invading virus.

Once inside the cell, the presence of the antibody is recognised by a naturally occurring protein in the cell called TRIM21 which in turn activates a powerful virus-crushing machinery that can eliminate the virus within two hours – long before it has the chance to hijack the cell to start making its own viral proteins. "This is the last opportunity a cell gets because after that it gets infected and there is nothing else the body can do but kill the cell," Dr James said.

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"That is the key concept that is different from how we think about immunity. At the moment we think of professional immune cells such as T-cells [white blood cells] that patrol the body and if they find anything they kill it.

"This system is more like an ambush because the virus has to go into the cell at some point and every time they do this, this immune mechanism has a chance of taking it out," he explained.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/a-cure-for-the-common-cold-may-finally-be-achieved-as-a-result-of-a-remarkable-discovery-in-a-cambridge-laboratory-2122607.html