New artificial cells developed by researchers at the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Weill Cornell Medical College, also in the U.S., can lure, entrap and inactivate a class of deadly human viruses, and could even become the basis for a new class of antiviral drugs. The novel artificial cells, which have a core of nanoporous silica wrapped in a lipid membrane embedded with “bait”, achieved a nearly 100 percent success rate in deactivating experimental analogs of Nipah and Hendra viruses, both of which can cause encephalitis in humans. NIST materials scientist David LaVan says of the cells, “We often call them honey pot protocells. The lure, the irresistibly sweet bait that you can use to capture something.” The technique developed by the researchers could also be a powerful research tool for studying how this class of viruses works. According to LaVan, “This is a nice system to study this sort of choreography between a virus and a cell, which has been very hard to study. A normal cell will have tens of thousands of membrane proteins. You might be studying this one, but maybe it’s one of the others that are really influencing your experiment. You reduce this essentially impossibly complicated natural cell to a very pure system, so you now can vary the parameters and try to figure out how you can trick the viruses.” The article can be viewed online at the link below.
http://www.nist.gov/mml/ceramics/20110301_protocells.cfm