While Americans worry every year about getting a flu shot or preventing
HIV/AIDS, the deadlier silent is actually Hepatitis C; killing over
15,000 people yearly in the U.S. since 2007 and the numbers continue to
increase as the carriers increase in age. While there is no vaccine,
there is hope in
nanoparticle technology.
The breakthrough came from a group of researchers at the
University of Florida,
creating a “nanozyme” that eliminates the Hep C 100% of the time;
before now, the six-month treatment would only work about half the time.
The particles are coated with two biological agents, the identifier and
the destroyer; the identifier recognizes the virus and sends the
destroyer off the eliminate the mRNA, which allows Hep C to replicate.
There is good and, unfortunately, disappointing news with this
discovery. The good news is that the mice test subjects have displayed
no side effects from this new treatment, but (this is the disappointing
part) because it is still just in the rodent testing stages it is still a
long way away from human trials, much less public use. However, it is
hope for the future and it may lead towards treatments in other fatal
diseases like HIV/AIDS or even a vaccine if all goes well.
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Nanoparticle Completely Eradicates Hepatitis C Virus
POSTED BY: Dexter Johnson
Researchers at the University of Florida (UF) have developed
a nanoparticle that has shown 100 percent effectiveness in eradicating the hepatitis C virus in laboratory testing.
The
nanoparticle, dubbed a nanozyme, consists of a backbone made from gold
nanoparticles and a surface with two biological components. One
biological component is an enzyme that attacks and destroys the mRNA,
which provides the recipe for duplicating the protein that causes the
disease. The other biological part is the navigator, if you will. It is a
DNA oligonucleotide that identifies the disease-related protein and
sends the enzyme on course to destroy it.
Y. Charles Cao, a UF associate professor of chemistry, and Dr. Chen
Liu, a professor of pathology at the UF College of Medicine published
their research online this week in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ("
Nanoparticle-based artificial RNA silencing machinery for antiviral therapy").
The basis of the work is mimicking the biological process of RNA
interference, which researchers in the past have used effectively in the
laboratory for
treating HIV. In
the UF research the nanoparticle mimics the function of RNA-induced
silencing complex (RISC), which mediates the RNA interference process.
Current hepatitis C treatments do attack the replication process of the
virus but they are not entirely effective and only help about 50
percent of the patients treated with them. Cao and Liu along with their
team wanted to see if they could improve upon that percentage. The
researchers claim that their treatment (in cell culture and mice) led to
a near 100 percent eradication of the hepatitis C virus without
bringing on any side effects caused by the immune system attacking the
treatment.
Of course, this is a long way from becoming a treatment anytime soon. A
major caveat is that the use of nanotreatments for the targeting and
destroying of abnormal cells like cancer cells is always problematic
since those cells are “still us” as
George Whitesides noted some time back.
It’s always a bit of a tricky business to make sure that nanoparticles
are targeting those biological processes within us that we want stopped
and not the ones we want to keep.
Further complicating this particular line of research is some of the
terminology that is part of the press release. They have decided to use
the term “
nanorobots”
to describe the nanoparticles, apparently because that can really
excite the general public about what might otherwise be a fairly niche
story. That’s fine, I suppose. Whatever manages to get the public
interested in what is genuinely ground breaking research. The problem is
that it creates confusion in some terribly
misguided people who are convinced that we are about to be overrun by ‘nanobots’
that will render the planet into nothing but “gray goo”. Can’t we
just retire the term “nano robots” for the sake of human life?
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