When early man first learned the secret of fire, to fashion and wield a spear, and to subdue all the world’s other creatures, he staked his undisputed claim to the top of the food chain. Ever since, only one type of living organism has been feared as a threat to man’s supremacy-the virus. The mere mention of the word strikes panic and raises anxiety levels. Yet in the war against human inflammatory diseases the virus, our feared foe, may now prove to be our greatest ally.
That is, if a development by cardiologist Dr. Alexandra Lucas and virologist Dr. Grant McFadden of the Robarts Research Institute, in London, Ontario, lives up to expectations. The doctors are investigating a new and unprecedented therapeutic, in which proteins isolated from viruses are used to treat illnesses like arthritis, atherosclerosis, and organ transplant rejection. What all these diseases have in common is they result from the body’s immune system working in overdrive, essentially causing the body to self-destruct. Atherosclerosis, for example, is caused by an immune response to excess cholesterol in the blood that leads to the invasion by white blood cells of the artery walls, inflammation, and the eventual formation of plaque. The viral proteins would act as anti-inflammatory agents, preventing the formation of plaque.
Viruses are tactical geniuses, outmanoeuvering and outsmarting the human body’s immune systems. Once they invade a cell, viruses produce and secrete proteins that protect the virus from an immune attack. The proteins are the virus’s first line of defense. They seek and bind the chemical messengers that recruit killer white blood cells. Sometimes, they mimic these immune messengers, competing with them to bind to cell receptors. A few viruses have evolved unique defense mechanisms of their own.
Although this innate viral defense system has been known for some time, the idea to exploit the viral proteins to treat human inflammatory diseases was actively pursued by McFadden and Lucas. Through years of research and numerous studies they determined that if the genes for these proteins were isolated and the proteins obtained and purified by genetic engineering techniques, viral proteins would mitigate the excessive immune responses. Over the past ten years McFadden and Lucas have performed studies on animals using several proteins they have isolated, focusing on the effect of one viral protein in particular, Serp-1 (isolated from myxoma, a pox virus). These studies have shown that Serp-1 significantly decreases arterial plaque deposition after intervention such as balloon angioplasty and, when combined with cyclosporine A, significantly prevents the incidence of chronic organ rejection.
In 1997, McFadden and Lucas co-founded, Viron Therapeutics Inc, to pursue the development of viral proteins as novel therapeutics. Nine years later, one of the first companies to have a compound in clinical trials. The efficacy and safety of their main compound, Serp-1, is currently being tested in clinical trials on 72 human volunteers with acute coronary syndrome (mild to moderate heart attacks receiving intervention).
The compound has been proven very safe and effective in numerous animal studies. Similarly in clinical trials with healthy human volunteers, no side effects were seen.
Further studies in animals will show whether prolonged use of the viral proteins triggers an immune response, in which the organism’s body begins to recognize the viral proteins as foreign and begin to generate antibodies, which could negate the effect of the proteins. But if the clinical trials run as smoothly as everything else has been going for this novel therapeutic, we could be looking at a whole new world of new therapeutic drugs for inflammatory illnesses; and all this provided to us by, perhaps unwillingly, the viruses themselves.
