USU awarded grant to develop drugs to treat flu, mad cow disease
Utah State University has been awarded a new research contract for $5.45 million for the development of drugs for influenza and the human type of mad cow disease.
The contract is from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and is an expansion of their existing contracts, said Robert Sidwell, professor of virology in the department of animal, dairy and veterinary sciences and director of the Institute for Antiviral Research at USU. Sidwell is working on the influenza research.
The Antiviral Substances Program in the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases is the department that has provided the funding in the NIH, Sidwell said.
“This has been a renewal and a major extension with the mad cow,” Sidwell said.
Donald Smee, a research professor in same department, will also be working on the influenza portion of the project, Sidwell said.
USU scientists have already aided in the creation of existing drugs to treat influenza, or the flu, Sidwell said. Tamiflu is a drug that has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and another that is in the process of approval is RWJ-270201, which has been in trial in the United States and Europe for the past year.
To get the contract, the university had to compete against others from across the nation, Sidwell said.
“We have to stay ahead of the game with our model systems and published research to qualify,” Sidwell said. “We have a good track record with the NIH.”
The mad cow research portion of this contract, provided by NIH as an addition, was not an expected one, Sidwell said.
The NIH approached them about undertaking the project because of the potential for a national emergency after what has been occurring in England, John Morrey, virology research professor, said.
The need for a drug to treat the human version of mad cow disease (Creutzfeld-Jakob disease), arose when the disease was discovered in England and as the potential for contamination into the United States became evident, Morrey said.
This disease is a fatal one that manifests itself slowly and affects the brain and nervous system, Sidwell said.
People get the disease from eating the cow form, Morrey said.
It is not a virus that carries the disease, but an infectious protein or prion, Morrey said. When it is ingested and comes in contact with normal proteins, it changes the structure of the normal proteins, spreading the disease. It does not reproduce or replicate, he said.
The job of scientists at USU is to evaluate chemical compounds created by other companies and see if they could be used as a drug to treat the diseases they’re focused on as well as to determine the mechanism by which they exert their antiviral effect, Sidwell said.
“We’re the interim area in the process of drug development,” Sidwell said.
There are already several flu drugs on the market, but they are seeking for better types of drugs to which the viruses are less resistant, Sidwell said.
There is nothing available for mad cow disease yet, Morrey said.
They are studying a type of the disease carried by mice because it is a much safer form to use, he said.
The latency of the disease is a primary concern, Morrey said. Someone can be infected with this disease and it could be from 10 to 20 years before symptoms are manifested.
“When a population is exposed to an agent, some come down relatively rapidly, but you don’t know how many have been exposed and could come down with it,” Morrey said.
Another problem with this disease is that it can’t be pre-diagnosed, Morrey said.
“Because of the uncertainty, we just want to be safe and develop something useful to treat it,” Morrey said.
The scientist who originally did the research on this disease was not considered to be credible because his findings were so unusual, but later he received the Nobel prize for his work, Morrey said.
In 1998, scientists in collaboration with the NIH created a class of compounds that was somewhat effective against the disease, Morrey said. The company that supplied the chemical compounds is called Frontier Scientific and is located in Logan.
The process to create the drug will be lengthy due in part to the need for large numbers of genetically engineered mice that are engineered to become infected with the mouse prion, Sidwell said. They have to have at least 100 mice all born within the same week.
Research being done for the flu is also of great importance as hundreds of thousands of people get it each year, Morrey said.
“Getting the vaccine is very slow, and they haven’t had enough to go around,” Sidwell said. “There is obviously a need for better drugs for the flu.”
In the past, flu epidemics have been known to kill millions, in particular the Spanish flu epidemic that killed more than 17 million people in 1918, Morrey said.
More recently, in Hong Kong, a type of flu from chickens killed several people, but mass killings of remaining chickens stopped the disease before it infected more.
“We’re trying to cure people and to make us healthier,” Sidwell said.