Researchers from the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, CEDENNA, developed a method that allows predicting essential proteins for the development of vaccines with viruses such as H1N1, HIV, SARS-CoV. With this method, it was discovered that there are three nonstructural proteins of Covid 19 that are key in the infection that the virus causes in humans.
Doctors Felipe Torres and Miguel Kiwi (National Prize for Exact Sciences), members of CEDENNA, together with Dr. Iván K. Schuller (researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and CEDENNA international advisor), discovered that proteins Nsp4, Nsp16 and Nsp12 have a key role in inhibiting the immune response of the human cell.
"The interactions of this set of proteins with the cell causes our immune system to suppress its ability to fight the virus," says Dr. Torres, lead author of this research, which has just been published in the prestigious journal Scientific Reports.
The identification of the proteins was achieved thanks to the mathematical modeling system that the three researchers created and that can also be applied to other viruses to determine the proteins that are important in the infection process. Once identified, the biomedical strategy can be focused on them and it would be possible to be more efficient against the disease.
“One of the objectives of the study we are carrying out is to facilitate the development of new drugs to combat covid-19, drugs or other types of treatments that attack these proteins. New vaccination or treatment strategies can be created, that is, we must forget about the target that we had until now to concentrate on this other focus to improve the immune response and avoid a serious disease”, emphasizes Dr. Miguel Kiwi.
“The result we obtained is of high impact – adds Dr. Schuller – considering that today the vast majority of vaccination strategies focus exclusively on the role of the Spike protein. Now that infections have begun to rise again, and that it is shown worldwide that the pandemic does not belong to the past, this can be very important to develop new vaccination strategies.
“We show that the elimination of certain non-structural proteins produces an important change in the structure of the Coronavirus infection. In turn, this implies that the elimination of a set of interactions between proteins reduces the effects of SARS-CoV-2, improving the immune response of the human being. This method is a very useful tool for the study of new variants of the Coronavirus and the infection caused by other viruses”, emphasizes Dr. Torres.
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