It’s rare that basic immunology research makes it into the pages of Nature’s news section, let alone those of a national daily newspaper. The jargon-heavy field has a steep learning curve, and even more so than other subjects, immunological advances seem incremental to the non-professional.
However, a quick scan of Britain’s daily newspapers today finds ample coverage of a nifty new paper titled “Antibodies mediate intracellular immunity through tripartite motif-containing 21 (TRIM21).” The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows how a recently discovered protein, TRIM21, helps destroy a virus linked to upper respiratory infections, once it’s inside of cells and coated with antibodies.
That’s interesting because antibodies are thought to do most of their work outside of our cells, blocking viruses from infecting cells in the first place or flagging invading pathogens to be recognized and eaten by specialist immune cells.
Newspapers offer another take. The Independent’s breathless front-page headline is: “A cure for the common cold may finally be achieved as a result of remarkable discovery in a Cambridge laboratory.” The Telegraph goes with the ‘cure for the cold’ angle, as well, while the Guardian is far more sanguine in calling the research a “new line of attack against viruses”.
Most of these stories are a rehash of a short press release from UK’s Medical Research Council, which mentions translating the research into treatments. But a cure for the common cold, this paper is not. Not even close.
The researchers, led by Leo James at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, found that one kind of adenovirus can enter cultured human cells after the researchers treated the viruses with antibodies. Once inside the cells, TRIM21 appears to latch onto the antibodies and shuttle the viruses to cellular structures that recycle proteins, called proteosomes, where the viruses are destroyed.
It’s possible that ramping up TRIM21 could help an immune system battle a viral infection, James told the Guardian. That may be true, but it’s not obvious how one would do that in laboratory animals, let alone safely in humans. So don’t abandon your throat lozenges just yet.
Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunologist at Yale University Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut thinks the paper is newsworthy, too, presuming the results are confirmed by others.
He just might have gone with a different headline. “Antibodies indeed have been thought to act exclusively extracellularly,” he says. “This is indeed a new function of antibodies.
Image of an antibody-shaped toy courtesy of furwillfly via Flickr under Creative Commons