Cold Symptoms Halved by New Medicine, Study Finds
A new study suggests that an experimental medicine halved the severity of symptoms in people paid to catch colds in the name of science.
It is too early to say whether Boehringer Ingelheim, a firm based in Ridgefield, Conn., will develop the substance--dubbed Tremacamra--for treatment of the common cold. This was the first study in humans to test the substance against the rhinovirus, the most common of cold viruses.
The substance was developed through genetic engineering. In the 1980s, researchers identified a protein on the cell wall that acts as the main entry gate for the all-too-common rhinovirus. The virus grabs this protein to gain passage into the cell, where it then replicates and causes cold symptoms. Boehringer scientists re-created the protein in the lab.
The scientists hoped that a spray of the protein into the nasal passage would protect against cold symptoms by posing as a decoy. The cold virus attaches to these decoy proteins instead of those in the body’s cells. The result, the study shows, is that it reduced cold symptoms by 50%.
“It’s difficult to say how it would perform in the real world,” said Gerhardt Pohl, a company biostatistician and co-author of the paper today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
In the study, Dr. Ronald Turner, a pediatrician at the Medical University of South Carolina, recruited 177 subjects at several sites. Each spent a week isolated in a hotel room after doctors introduced a cold virus into their noses. About 80 of them received the experimental medicine and the others received a placebo.
For the next 21 days, including their week in the hotel room, the subjects kept detailed logs of symptoms, and blood tests were taken to measure viral shedding, evidence that the virus had infected them.
The scientists reported that Tremacamra had an impressive impact on all measures of illness. The medicine was equally effective at reducing symptoms whether they gave it before the viral exposure or 12 hours later.
It is not clear whether all those infected with cold viruses in the laboratory would have developed the sniffles without treatment. Other studies suggest that only 70% of people exposed to such viruses actually get symptoms.
