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March/April 2009: A Chosen Flu |
A Chosen Flu
Scientists at Trudeau Institute might save our lives
by Annie Stoltie
By the end of 1919, after two years of infecting a third of the people on the planet, the Spanish flu had claimed some 50 million lives. In this country the disease clobbered not just the very young and old, but 20- to 40-year-olds: soldiers, many just home from World War I battlefields; prison inmates; and inhabitants of metropolises like San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston. You'd assume that the Adirondacks' remoteness would have protected those living here, but decades before the Roaring Twenties a network of trains punctured the Blue Line, delivering folks from big cities to bumbletootie.
Wander through the headstones at an Adirondack cemetery and you'll probably find evidence of the influenza pandemic. In Keene Valley 14 out of the 300-plus people who contracted the virus died. Incapacitated gravediggers and a brutal winter meant anyone able had to bury the victims in the most accessible plots, near the road in Keene's Norton Cemetery.
So what did the phthisiologists at Saranac Lake's Trudeau Sanatorium make of this global plague? After all, these tuberculosis experts were pulmonary pros. (Influenza, like TB, is respiratory, transmitted through a cough or a sneeze. Unlike TB, which is viable outside the body for a week, a flu virus survives 15 to 30 minutes.) By the Spanish flu's outbreak some of these scientists had already been hunching over microscopes and collapsing lungs for more than 30 years.
Accounts from the Adirondack Enterprise in December 1918 report just a handful of cases in the village of Saranac Lake; Trudeau records state that its 356 TB patients treated that year remained untouched, most likely the result of scrupulous sanitary methods and sequestration. And though physicians figured it wouldn't do much, they vaccinated patients with what, indeed, turned out to be the wrong microbial agent.
Dr. Laura Haynes, associate member of Trudeau Institute, now a world-renowned medical research facility, describes a contemporary vaccination process that hasn't changed much since 1918. Haynes explains that each year the World Health Organization (WHO) selects the three strains of influenza, named according to the places where they're isolated, that it expects will emerge. A vaccine, manufactured in chicken eggs—the easiest way to propagate vats of virus—is then harvested and administered as a preventive measure. But it takes time to grow a virus, and the WHO can misjudge which flus to designate. It's "an archaic way of protecting the world," says Haynes.
That's why the U.S. Department of Defense is funding a collaboration between the San Diego–based U.S. Naval Health Research Center and nonprofit Trudeau Institute to "develop new scientific weaponry to protect our military against the threat of the next influenza pandemic." (Troops inhabit close quarters, enabling the spread of disease and affecting battle-readiness—a potential military disaster.) Congressman John McHugh helped secure the two-year deal for Trudeau, appropriating $1.6 million per fiscal year to the institute, beginning in fall 2008.
Imagine a flu virus as a microscopic sphere. Its outer shell is covered with protein knobs; the sequence of the knobs determines its strain. Currently, vaccines target these knobs. But inside the virus is more protein—the actual machinery that allows the virus to function. No matter the strain of influenza, this internal protein stays the same. The challenge for project leader Haynes and her 10-person team is to make a vaccine that affects the molecules inside the virus, creating a universal, or "cross-reactive," one.
There's a lot at stake: Each year more than a million people worldwide die from the flu. And maybe you've seen the pandemic-preparedness TV commercials—the medical community and government expect another epidemic at any time. Because jet travel and other modern transportation allow supersonic viral transmission, scientists are in "a race against bird flu," says Haynes.
Trudeau is one of a handful of facilities devoted to this research. If you're thinking, Great, the fate of humankind lies with people working in a town known for ice castles and temperatures suitable for penguins, stop right there: The institute, which employs 135, including 13 faculty members—all medical-research superstars—is responsible for seminal discoveries in the study of the human immune system, particularly with infectious diseases and cancer. Sure, Trudeau's rural campus is a six-million-acre state park away from similarly focused biomedical outfits—on sunny days resident brainiacs lunch on the institute's private Lower Saranac Lake beach. But within its expanding corridors, like the new Ronald B. Stafford Research Wing, are laboratories appointed with state-of-the-art equipment.
Haynes's flu project involves cells from mouse spleens, lymph nodes and blood. (The institute's use of mice, once kept under wraps, is now a shared reality: "The public is savvy enough to know we have to use mice to eradicate diseases," says Trudeau communications manager Brian Turner.) Her researchers use a mouse-adapted—not human—strain of the infection to study vaccine responses.
Haynes says success would be "paradigm changing." It would be a breakthrough, adds Turner, that has "a global impact from the Adirondacks."
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