A Taiwanese medical team unveiled on Friday the mechanism by which enterovirus 71 (EV-71) develops into a disease, the first step in developing an effective cure for diseases caused by various enteroviral infections, the researchers said.
Ten to 20 percent of patients in Taiwan with severe EV-71 die every year, but there is still no effective treatment due to a lack of knowledge about the viral infection process, said Yu Sung-liang (俞松良), an associate professor in National Taiwan University’s Department of Clinical and Laboratory Sciences and Medical Biotechnology.
After three years of research, Yu and his team, which is composed of specialists from various fields, found that microRNA-141 was the key in regulating EV-71, a breakthrough in the understanding of the -enteroviral infection model.
RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is found throughout cells and governs the manufacture of proteins.
The finding was published in Cell Host & Microbe, a popular journal in the field of medical biology on Thursday.
“Viruses are very smart,” said Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池), the dean of National Taiwan University’s College of Medicine, explaining that viruses invade the host through -different mechanisms or routes, most of which are unknown at present.
“Through this study, we know that EV-71 takes over the human body by first manipulating -microRNA-141, which controls more than 100 genes that produce useful proteins,” he said.
According to Yang, since different species of enteroviruses, such as Coxsackievirus and Poliovirus, adopt the same pattern as EV-71 in attempting to shut off human body functions, the finding should be helpful in developing a cure for all types of entroviral infections.
The next step would be to -develop an anti-microRNA-141 drug to be tested on animals and humans already infected with EV-71, said Yang, who hoped that a remedy could be developed within two years.
EV-71 infection can result in different and potentially deadly symptoms, such as aseptic meningitis, paralysis, myocarditis and cardiopulmonary failure.
Taiwan’s first outbreak of EV-71 was in 1998, leaving 78 patients dead. The virus can be found in many East Asian countries, such as Taiwan, China, Malaysia and South Korea.
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