Scientists at Purdue University have developed a new therapy to fight the flu that may also prove effective against other diseases such as HIV, cancer and COVID-19.
The new targeted therapy approach attacks only infected cells while not harming healthy cells.
Viruses such as the flu infect the surface membrane of a host cell with proteins, which then bud off nascent viruses that spread to adjacent cells. The team at Purdue designed homing molecules that target cells with those proteins and recruit the immune system to attack the infected cells.
Philip Low is the Ralph C. Corley Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Purdue. He has started three companies based on his research in targeted therapeutics. One, Endocyte Inc., sold to pharmaceutical giant Novartis two years ago for $2.1 billion.
“We recruit the immune system to eradicate the virus,” Low said. “No other therapy out there recruits the immune system to eliminate the virus, and it turns out to be much more powerful.”
The team tested the targeted therapy in the lab on mice infected with the influenza virus, inoculating them with 100 times the lethal dose of the virus. Low said they were able to cure 100 percent of the mice using the targeted therapy.
“The reason why we go to this high dose is that there are the patients that you really worry about or those that are admitted to the hospital because their infection has progressed beyond the point that they would normally recover on their own,” Low said. “And so you would like to be able to set up a challenging model system that will allow you to see if your new therapy might be able to treat these very advanced and severe infections in human patients. And we've been very successful of it now, with our new therapy.”
More than 2 million people in the United States are hospitalized annually with the flu and 30,000 to 80,000 Americans die each year from the flu or complications from it. Targeted therapy could help reduce that number.
“Because it's targeted, we don't see any toxicity to healthy cells, so far anyway,” Low said. “If it proves to behave similarly in humans, which we hope it will, it could greatly reduce that number. So, I don't know. I mean, those are questions, those are issues that are hard to predict. But right now, the data look extremely promising.”
Low said the targeted therapy could be used to treat a number of viral infections.
“The same strategy will be applicable for development of therapies for HIV, for hepatitis B, for respiratory syncytial virus, for Ebola virus, for COVID-19, for, you know, all sorts of viral infections,” he said.
“We also have therapies in the clinic for treatment of cancer. And in that way, we again find something, some protein that is uniquely expressed only in cancer cells, and design a homing molecule that can carry and attached chemotherapeutic drug very selectively to the malignant cell.”
Low said it could be six or seven years before the targeted therapy approach clears through clinical trials and is approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
The team’s research was published in “Nature Communications.”
