medical fun fact
Apparently a cure for the common cold was discovered in the mid-80s, but nobody uses it because it interacts badly with hormonal birth control.
This fun fact brought to you by the science conference @Canageek is at, which is holding a memorial session for the crystallographer who discovered it.
I wonder if, now that more people in North America are using non-hormonal birth control, they'll start working on it again
medical fun fact
@DialMforMara @Canageek@cybre.space huh - i'd also like to know more information on this
presumably it's some type of antiviral, which works effectively across the many many many viruses that collectively are 'the common cold', and i'm not really aware of any antivirals that have such severe side effects - usually they tend to be efficacious antivirals by throwing a spanner in the works at a point that doesn't affect the rest of the body much.
medical fun fact
@DialMforMara ah wait, i think i've found it - pleconaril is the stuff they're talking about.
>We also discovered that certain anti-rhinovirus drugs bound to a pocket in the capsid (26), a discovery that led to recognizing that the stable infectious virions were destabilized on binding to a receptor by ejecting a bound “pocket factor” molecule, thus initiating infection. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3308792/
medical fun fact
@DialMforMara w so it seems to be not really for all common colds, but for enteroviruses the drug prevents "the pH-mediated uncoating of the viral RNA" aka it getting at its own RNA to hijack the cell's machinery, thus stopping it from replicating. it works differently for rhinoviruses, binding to a certain receptor point. it also may work a third way entirely on another set of viruses.
it's still in trial via nasal spray but so far odds don't look good as the phase 2 trial>
medical fun fact
@DialMforMara came up with nothing statistically significant for it being used that way - https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00394914
i still don't quite know HOW pleconaril could affect hbc that dramatically, but it seems to negate it to the point where many complained of spotting and there were several unplanned pregnancies during the trial.
it's also not a 100% sure thing, and viruses can become resistant to pleconaril - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1280128/
medical fun fact
@DialMforMara i may just be chattering your ear off now but i kind of hate anything that says "can you BELIEVE that SCIENCE has a CURE for x???" while neglecting to mention that... the situation is messy. it frustratingly promotes this conspiracy theory thinking that BIG PHARMA DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW yada yada then you get people injecting their children with bleach.
it's important and great work done by this person! but... i wish they had actually memorialized *his work*