Is There a Cure for The Common Cold In Our Future?

Is there a cure for the common cold within our grasp? Would you be surprised if you were to read that one might possibly be on the market within a year? Would you be amazed to find out that the same class of medicine might also be effective against viral meningitis, summer flu, newborn infections, and polio?

Well one IS! Its name is Pleconaril and if extensive testing (currently going on) proves the drug effective, the product could be in the drug store (chemists/pharmacies) inventories within a year. Pleconaril is a member of a small group of compounds that kill viruses. It is thought so effective, it numbers about 170 different viruses that succumb to its powers.

Pleconaril is unique in many ways. To begin with, it isn't a discovered entity, but a designed creation.

The quest for the drug began in the usual manner. Scientists had absolutely no idea at the time what retroviruses and enteroviruses looked like, but began testing thousands of drug entities to see if any might show some affect on the rhinovirus. As it turned out, one particular item seemed to slow down the activity of a few of the 101 varieties of the virus.

Nothing much happened to spur progress in the quest until about 1985, when Purdue University's Michael Rossmann and a team of researchers mapped the three-dimensional structure of the cold virus, a twenty-sided entity called an icosahedron. This was the information needed by Sterling drug scientists to identify the achilles heel of the offending virus.

The twenty sides of the rhino and enteroviruses are pocked, or dented, by a wandering crater, the center of which is the exact point from which the virus spews its genes into the invaded cell. This results in reproduction of the virus. An effective drug would plug the crater negating the virus' ability to reproduce, a situation that renders the virus harmless.

Eventually, further study showed the outside of the virus had sixty spots where the drug called Pleconaril might lock on. Five locks were needed to stop the virus from infecting. Armed with this new knowledge, scientists could begin adjusting the drug utilizing a process called rational drug design.

After innumerable arrangements and rearrangements of the drug molecule, it was decided that a fit was reached that could do what was intended, plug the spew of genes. Pleconaril had reached the testing stage. Animals (mice in particular) do not catch colds, so it was determined that the tests should proceed using the polio virus, an enterovirus, on mice.

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