• Question: Why is it so hard to find a cure for this disease but it was easy to find a cure for the cold

    Asked by anon-252892 on 4 May 2020. This question was also asked by anon-255068.
    • Photo: Juhi Gupta

      Juhi Gupta answered on 4 May 2020:

      COVID-19 is a new strain (version) and so scientists around the world are trying to learn more about it. A possible treatment such as a vaccine can be produced only if we have enough knowledge for example, about the structure of the virus and how it functions. Scientists are researching into COVID currently and we will hopefully hear more soon. The NHS website has some useful summaries of we already know about COVID. In terms of the cold (or seasonal flu, Influenza), there is no “cure” as such, but we have treatments like the “flu-jab” (or Influenza vaccine). These were produced based on our knowledge of previous strains of the flu. This has been studied over many years, giving scientists enough information to produce safe vaccines or alternative medicines to treat symptoms such as coughs.

    • Photo: Angela Downie

      Angela Downie answered on 4 May 2020:

      Finding cures for diseases takes a long time and a big effort from lots of people. COVID-19 is a very new disease, a year ago we had no idea this virus was out there! A lot of scientists have been thinking of ways in which we can try to cure the virus, or to make a vaccine that will stop people from getting it. Right now we have people who are trying new vaccines, looking to see if medicines we already have can help us fight COVID-19 and studying the virus so we can find new tools to treat it however it is a long process because we need to make sure all of these things are safe and are doing a good job at fighting the virus. Every medicine we have is the result of lots of hard work and research by doctors and scientists and has gone through lots of testing!

    • Photo: Sophie Pritchard

      Sophie Pritchard answered on 4 May 2020:

      Thank you for your question. Luckily more and more information is being discovered everyday. Scientists are obtaining samples from covid-19 positive patients and they are sequencing these samples to find out the genetic code for the virus. This information tells us a lot about the virus, and gives the scientists a set of instructions from which to make an effective vaccine. It is important to sequence samples from many different patients to check that the virus isn’t changing too quickly, and/or there are not different strains (types of virus). We need to know all this information before making a vaccine to ensure that it’s effective.
      We do not have a cure for the common cold, but most people recover quickly from a cold and aren’t too badly effected. We do however have a vaccine for flu, but the vaccine is slightly modified each year because the virus mutates/changes slightly which makes it a new strain. I hope this helps to answer your question 🙂

    • Photo: Jeremy Schwartzentruber

      Jeremy Schwartzentruber answered on 4 May 2020:

      What we call “the common cold” can actually be caused by different viruses. Sometimes a cold is due to a rhinovirus, sometimes a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and sometimes a coronavirus! (Just a different coronavirus than the SARS-Cov-2 virus that has caused the current pandemic.) And none of these have cures or vaccines yet. The main reason is that common colds aren’t very serious infections, and so it hasn’t been worth the major effort to develop a vaccine.

    • Photo: Ben Wiggins

      Ben Wiggins answered on 5 May 2020:

      Thanks for your question! The main reason that the common cold is less of a problem to society than coronavirus comes down to disease severity – the common cold is really just a minor inconvenience to the vast majority of us, whereas the novel coronavirus is so much more infectious and can cause serious illness in some. Still, many researchers have looked over time at creating a vaccine for the common cold (interesting guardian article from 2017 here https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/06/why-cant-we-cure-the-common-cold) but there are just so many different types and subtypes of viruses that cause the common cold that it is hard to educate your immune system to recognise all of these. This likely explains why you can keep catching a common cold again and again, as you are always catching a different virus that your immune system has not remembered from before! It is also partly an issue of funding, as although the common cold is an inconvenience and probably costs companies a lot of money through people having to take sick days etc., the incentive to spend a lot of money developing a vaccine is not as strong as for covid-19 which is causing a global crisis.

      As others rightly say, we are still very early on in understanding how this virus interacts with our immune systems. Normally to develop a vaccine, scientists must do years of research to understand what cell types are involved in clearing the virus, and answering questions like how do we get long term and robust immune memory so we don’t get sick, and how does immunity differ in older people or people with other long term diseases? Understandably finding a vaccine for the novel coronavirus has had to be fast-tracked to begin before we fully understand the immune response yet, instead basing decisions on what is known about immune responses to similar coronaviruses. It is still very important for scientists to understand how the immune system works in people who successfully fight off the novel coronavirus though, as knowing this will allow us to develop the best possible vaccine, and make the best decisions on coming out of lockdown based on how sure we are that those of us that have had it are protected.

      Lots of great, well explained answers to common coronavirus questions have been put together by the British society for immunology here: https://www.immunology.org/news/coronavirus-immunology-qa-what-you-need-know-about-our-new-report
      This video is also great for explaining how the novel coronavirus infects our body (and I just love their simple explanations of all sorts of complicated science): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtN-goy9VOY.

      Lastly, I genuinely love talking about immunology as this is what I research every day! Any other questions about the immune system and how we fight off infections at all feel free to ask me anything!

    • Photo: Sophie Adjalley

      Sophie Adjalley answered on 5 May 2020:

      Hi Ethan,

      well, we haven’t found a cure for the common cold, yet, the main reason being that it can be caused by many different kinds of viruses! And because most people recover fairly easily from a cold, there hasn’t been as much effort invested in the research as for the flu (caused by influenza viruses) or covid-19 (caused by Sars-CoV-2) for instance. But if we put things in perspective, the world has known about this new virus only for a few months, so there is still a lot we need to understand about its pathogenesis, mode of transmission, its interaction with the immune system, its evolution. Here are a couple of examples of questions we need to address:
      – does the virus mutate as much as an influenza virus, which would mean that a one-time vaccination would probably not work?
      – are people, who have been infected by the virus protected against new infections? And can we mimic such protection with a vaccine?
      – assuming that we found a medicine or vaccine that can inactivate the virus or prevent its entry into cells, is it safe to give to people?
      As you can see there are many questions the scientists need to address and are currently investigating, but this has been the case for all diseases including viral infections for which we now have a cure or a vaccine!

    • Photo: Ellie Dunstone

      Ellie Dunstone answered on 5 May 2020:

      Firstly – we actually don’t have a cure for the common cold! The common cold is caused by a group of different viruses, but they only cause very mild symptoms and very rarely kill anyone, so it gets better all on it’s own thanks to your immune system!

      We have some treatments (that help symptoms improve once you are infected) and vaccines (that prevent you getting infected at all) for other diseases, such as flu. But these weren’t easy to find, it took lots of people lots of years to do it – we’ve just had a lot of time because these diseases appeared in humans hundreds of years ago (or more). COVID-19 appeared very recently, so we haven’t got there yet. As well as finding a possible treatment, scientists need to check it works and it is safe before they can give it to everyone, making it take even longer.

    • Photo: Laura Durrant

      Laura Durrant answered on 5 May 2020:

      We have not yet found a cure for the common cold, as it is caused by different viruses! This is why sometimes a cold can be up in your sinuses or a cough in your chest. This is also why there are several types of flu vaccine, for example (check out this link to the NHS website for more details: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/flu-influenza-vaccine/). However, because these viruses can spread rapidly, they also evolve rapidly. This makes it harder to cure the common cold – and so, regular vaccinations are currently the best way to manage the spread and rates of infection.
      COVID-19 is a very new virus that we do not know much about. First, we need to understand the science of the virus before exploring potential routes for treatment and vaccination. This is what we are currently doing and it may take some time! Once we know more, like how it spreads, how it evolves over time and how it infects us, we can start designing ways to immunise people in a similar way to the common cold. I hope this answers your question 🙂

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