Bradley Young

I know Im a small fish in a big pond, but I just want to help. This is a recent convo with my professor and I'd like to know what are your thoughts. ME: I have been doing some digging on a couple of ideas that I had. I was wondering if there were a way to distrupt the (Van der Waal forces) of the lipid bilayer of the virus inside of the body the same way polarized soap molecules do outside of it. Just a civil scientist thought. Orrrrr some way for the lysosomes to become hypersensitive to the invader... Thoughts... PROF FLETCHER: Counterpoint: what else in the body has a lipid bilayer? what would be the danger in a pharmaceutical that emulsified lipids?  ME: Yeah, I thought about that too and wondered if there were a way to specialize it only to the virus. Slippery little devils. lol. How about increasing the signal sensitivity of the lysosomes to interrupt the infectious cycle within the cell. I was also curious about affecting the cell's receptors rendering it non-susceptable or permissive. Particularly cytokine and/or glycoprotein sensitivity. Or differentiating viral lipids over cellular as the desired target. Wish I had a magic wand.  PROF FLETCHER:FHey Bradley, I'm glad you're putting critical thought into this issue! Hand soap works by emulsifying lipid molecules. While it is true that disrupting the Van der Waals forces that are holding together the bilayer surrounding the virus, it's important to consider what else in the body has that similar structure and what else may be affected by this disruption. So my question is this: where else have we seen this bilayer structure? what else might be affected by disrupting lipid molecules? how would you increase specificity to differentiate between viral and human cell membrane? Yes, increasing sensitivity is also a good line of thinking. Do you have any thoughts on what might need to happen to make the lysosomes more sensitive? ME: Thank you for all of your wisdom and great feedback. I truly appreciate it😊 These are great leads that I do intend to follow-up on. Thanks🤓 This is a later convo with a medical biotechnologist: Vishnu: You could use the natural pH changes occurring in the virus-infected cell to trigger a drug release. A salient feature is the reduction in intracellular pH (pHi) of virus-infected cells. If I'm not mistaken, lysosomal enzymes are acid hydrolases, which are active at the acidic pH5. They are not active at the neutral pH (about 7.2). Degradable, pH-sensitive, membrane-destabilizing, comb-like polymers have been used previously for nucleic acids delivery into a cell. It is not implausible to think of using such a pH-sensitive extra sac around the lysosomal complex to deliver it into a virus-infected cell. This sac will automatically enter a low pH cell. It will disintegrate once inside a virus-infected cell exposing the lysosomal enzymes. I'm not a biomaterials trained person so, I can't actually name many polymers, but there are biomaterials and nanomaterials capable of doing this. One example is pH-sensitive ethylacrylic acid (EAA) monomers and hydrophobic hexyl methacrylate monomers (HMA). ME: So you are saying introducing it through phagocytosis like a Trojan horse. I didn't even think of pH affecting lysosomal enzymatic activity. Vishnu: Yes, introduce it like phagocytosis. Yup, pH affects a lot of things. It is a decent hypothesis to test. I'm pretty sure there will be some specificity issues. Maybe there is a gradient of pH around the virus-infected cell. It may dampen the specificity. I don't know. Awesome you're digging deep into this. 🙂 👍🏽 You too! Namaste and Merci!