British scientists have shown that the body's immune system can destroy the common cold virus after it has invaded cells in the body — a feat that was thought to be impossible.

The discovery, reports Britain's newspaper The Independent, will allow the development of a new class of antiviral drugs that boost the natural ability of the cell to kill viruses.

And it's not just the common cold virus that will be in the scientists' crosshairs: The new technique could also be used to target the norovirus, which causes vomiting, and rotavirus, which causes severe diarrhea and kills children in developing countries.

Researchers from the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge found that when anti-viral antibodies enter the cell at the same time as the virus, a virus-killing protein within the cell is alerted and kills the virus.

"In any immunology textbook you will read that once a virus makes it into a cell, that is game over because the cell is now infected, team leader Leo James of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, told The Independent. "At that point there is nothing the immune response can do other than kill that cell," said Leo James, who led the research team.

It was previously thought that antibodies only did their work outside of cells. The knowledge that they also work on the inside as well opens promising new pathways of research.


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