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This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jeff Sandou. Last week our veteran hosts did a little bit of ranting to Richard Bradbury because he knows I wouldn't have let him get away with that nonsense. This week I'm back and I'm holding CulturePop's Met Amatage to task.
He's the one who wants us to be optimistic about science. He's not going to go. Met's plane to us, Met. Why we can't cure the common cold?
Hey Jeff, there's no need to bully me. And I know where you were last week. You were off with Elon Musk. You were planning your fake VR version of the Mars landings and you were building Lego versions of his damn big rocket or whatever it calls it.
But no, you're right. There's a huge number of common and everyday things that science hasn't discovered yet or simply can't explain. And yes, we can talk about the cold. But let's not forget though, as I was talking about last week with Richard when I went off on my rant, science really is the pursuit of knowledge.
It's not a crystal ball. Scientists are just people who are working with information. They don't necessarily have all the answers and we can't really expect them to have the answers. It doesn't mean we won't have answers in the future.
It's just the case that we haven't got them today and we're probably not going to have them tomorrow either. And that's kind of the disparity because sometimes things are a lot more complicated than they might appear from the outside. Often when we make discoveries, we're really stumbling on something. It's intuitive, it's possibly even accidental.
So it can take a long while for knowledge to catch up and explain what we can see and hear and talk. And you're going to see a man discovering fire again, aren't you? I was until you burst my bubble. Okay, I'll broaden my options and I'll do something else instead.
Okay, the bicycle, the humble bicycle. I imagine that you and most of our readers can ride a bike, right? It's a pretty simple process. You get on it, you pedal a bit, but why does the bike stay up with your plump behind on the saddle?
It's just a balance, right? Stability, balance. Or you've got to balance it. If you let go of the bicycle, it would drop.
It would fall. But if you sit on it and you've got a balance, an inbuilt human balance, it stays upright. So I could summarize that as you don't know. Yeah, no.
We've all observed bikes. If you push a bike away from you, it will keep going in a much straight line until it runs out of momentum and then like you said, it'll crash in a heap. When we're on board, yes, we pedal, we give it that momentum to keep going and we can steer it out of the way of obstacles. But scientists can't actually agree why it works.
The consensus of opinion until the 1970s was that cycles observed something called the gyroscopic effect. The theory holds that it's the spinning wheel, like you were saying, the momentum that holds the bike upright. But that was actually disproven in the 1970s when it was demonstrated that you could fit one wheel to rotate in the other direction and the bike would still say, right. So basically that gyroscopic effect was canceled out, but the bike still stays upright.
So then we switched to another theory that they're calling the caster effect, which is like the shopping trolley. Yeah, except it turns out that the followers of that theory were all off their trolleys as well. The idea for the caster effect is that the wheel actually touches the ground behind the steering axis. So if you look at the force of a bike, there's a bit of a curve.
If you follow the line or the curve, that will actually intersect with the ground ahead of where the wheel touches the ground. So that supposedly was the steering axis, the force that allowed the bike to stand upright. And that sort of makes sense. So what's wrong with that theory?
Well, nothing apart from the fact it isn't true. A couple of years ago, through some nifty engineering work, teams at Cornell and other universities, built bikes that had no gyroscopic effect and no caster effect. And what do you think they did? No gyroscopic effect, probably if L could be.
No, they stayed upright, which means that today a skilled, a very young child commander in a few hours completely eludes a science community that has invented hadron colliders and nanobots and has a pretty good idea of what goes on inside a black hole. Does it matter how a bicycle works? No, in a sense, it doesn't because we can see it, we can touch it, we can ride it. It's real.
It's there in front of us. It's also why the best bike designers are often people who have a lot of experience in terms of cycling rather than an advanced astrophysics degree, because it's actually about trial and error, because the scientific principles we can't agree on, we keep reinventing them. And that's not to belittle the bike figures I found on the net, which is always reliable, suggests that we make around three times as many bikes a year as we do cars and a good bike can last you decades because they're sturdy, they're robust, they're mechanically simple. You can still find those 1940s postal bikes in jump shop, Sim Malaysia, and after a bit of TLC, those things work perfectly, perfectly fine.
And definitely the bike is going to be my transport of choice for the post-apocalypse, as long as there's no zombies. But as we move on to the common cold, if something as ubiquitous as the bike, and there are thousands, sorry, hundreds of millions of bikes on the world's roads, if something as simple as that illudes us, then I don't think it's that much of a surprise why we can't cure the cold. But which I have to say, why are colds so common? Well, that's something that the good folks who research colds have been battling with for years and years.
The cold is common because it happens a lot, so adults on average get up to two to three colds per year. Kids can get as many as eight to ten. And by and large, it's no big deal. Again, figures I found on the net.
Whoa, I'm suggesting we lose an average of one day per person, whether it's work or school, every time we come down with the cold. So while the cold is common, the cold virus is actually anything but. So I'm really only going to scratch the topic today. If you want to check out more, there's a really interesting article on the Guardian called, Why Can't We Cure the Common Cold by Nicola Davison?
So you can go over and find that. I'll ask the question in a different way. Why is the cold so uncommon? Largely because the thing we think of as one disease is a lot of different strains.
So we used to talk about the various strains of flu, swine flu, both flu, but then nothing compared to the sheer simplicity and abundance of cold viruses. With colds, there are actually seven main types. There's the rhinovirus, there's the coronavirus influenza, para influenza, adenovirus, respiratory sinctical virus, which is known as RSV. But the last one metanumovirus, we actually only identified that in 2001.
So a knowledge of what a cold is is not constant. Even that is constantly evolving. And between those seven types of virus, there are actually more than 200 different sub viruses. So when you get a cold, you don't have one disease, you have one of 200 diseases.
So these sub viruses, or serotypes, as they're known, there are more than 160 strains of rhinovirus alone, and that's the one that's responsible for up to three quarters of the colds in adults. And each of them targets the body in a different way. So these symptoms we feel may be similar, but the way they attack us and the way they invade our body is very, very different, which makes them very hard to prevent and very hard to treat. But we must know the basics, like how cold spread?
Even though the cold virus is a slippery devil, paraphrasing from the Guardian back in 1984, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they tried to figure out the best ways to catch a cold. So they infected volunteers with a cold virus. Well, no, I mean, you know, in the name of virus. And they instructed them to kiss healthy people on the mouth for at least one minute.
So you've got 16 healthy volunteers kissed by people with colds, only one person developed an infection. Yeah, exactly. So from 1946 until 1990, the UK actually had a research institute called the Common Cold Unit, which looked into ways of catching colds and curing colds. And over that 45 years, they actually used more than 20,000 people as guinea pigs for testing the cold in the name of science.
And again, they found that a lot of the tales about how you catch colds are simply not true. One of the early experiments they did was giving people a hot bath, and then afterwards, they made them stand dripping wet and shivering in a cold corridor for 30 minutes. And this is the UK. Wow.
So it was fairly nippy. And even after they were allowed to get dressed, they had to wear wet socks for a few hours after that. Yeah, I know. Whoever comes up with this one.
I can't imagine. That would be a job for me. I mean, they experienced a drop in body temperature, obviously, because you made them stand naked in a cold corridor. But they didn't develop any more colds than a group of volunteers who had been sitting in the dry and the warm.
So a lot of the old wives tales about the cold and how you get it and wrapping up warm and staying away from drafts and all this kind of stuff. Simply not true. Well, we're talking about why we can't cure the common cold with culture pops and man amortation. We'll be right back with more Mets, playing VFM 89.9.
Barry, France, Motown, BFM 89.9, the business station. And we're back with culture pops and man amortation with another episode of Mets, and this time around is why we can't cure the common cold. So Matt, early on, we talked about some of the crazy research that has been done into how cold spread, but where has the most of research been concentrated at? Well, rhinovirus, obviously because there's 160 different types and it's the most common in terms of the way it spreads to people as well.
And they did have some early successes, but after those successes, because of the number of serotypes, they realized they wouldn't be able to rely on the traditional route for making a vaccine, which is essentially producing a vaccine for each strain. People complain about having to go and get a single flu shot. Imagine if you had to get 160 different cold shots. Yeah, exactly every few years.
You'd look like a plucked porcupine or something. Astonishingly, as a result of all of this, according to the Guardian, the last human clinical trials for the cold took place back in 1975. Wow, why aren't cold viruses attractive? Well, that's a complicated story in itself.
Look at the Ebola breakout a couple of years ago. Now, we were able to rush experimental vaccines out in a few months. We're not going to argue the ethics of that today, but there has definitely been a shift towards more chronic diseases like the flu mutations we mentioned before, HIV and all these kind of pandemic type diseases and viruses. So you might think it's for the glamour, because those are the headline grabbing illnesses, but often it's simply about resources.
And that brings us back to a recurring Matt's Blaine theme, which is responsibility. You look at scientific and technological development over the last 100 years. So many of our important discoveries have been publicly funded, or they've been made possible by building on the research or the patents that not the profit groups have made public. We've seen a shift away from that approach over the last few decades.
There must be some kind of money in this research by the big, big drug companies. But weirdly, the wave-accines work isn't really attractive to drug companies, because you get the shot before you're sick. So people expect vaccines to be cheap. You're not really incentivised to pay for something to protect from a disease you don't have, unless it's a pandemic type thing that threatens your life.
By contrast, we're willing to pay billions for stuff to alleviate the symptoms that we can't cure. Paratives like painkillers and decongestants or natural remedies and vitamins, and that's the kind of money that drug companies like. They like this ongoing, repeated business. Look at drugs like statins.
They can cut the risk of a stroke or a heart attack, and they're profitable because patients take them for decades and decades. So it's a conspiracy by demand to keep us sick? No, I mean, it literally is just economics. That's why I say it's about where we want our research and development to come from.
Private companies with a profit motive, or national and supranational bodies, have very different incentives. Vaccines can take 10 to 15 years. They can take a billion or more dollars to produce. And before you make a profit, you have to earn that billion dollars back.
So you're in a situation where the market has to be worth tens of billions to be attractive to a drug company. If you get 10 or 15 years down that path, and it turns out the drug doesn't work, then it can literally wipe out your company. What would the process look like? Are there any examples of companies that have fallen into this trap?
Loads. I mean, most drugs actually don't make it to market because apparently even amongst the drugs that are successful in tests with mice, for example, 80% of those then fail when it transfers to humans. So the failure rate with drug development is very, very high. The Guardian uses an example of a US phone called Novovax, which developed an RSV cold vaccine last year.
And they thought RSV was a good bet because even though it's less common than rhinovirus, it has a huge impact on the young and the old. So they thought there was probably about a $1 billion opportunity for Novovax in the US. So worldwide, that would be several billion dollars. But in their phase three trial with elderly patients, it basically didn't really do anything to prevent infection or very little.
So after that news broke, Novovax share prices fell from $8.34 to $1. Wow. That is a fall of 83%. So it's no wonder that there are so few players in the vaccine market amongst the dozens of established and emerging pharmaceutical companies.
Still, that's an example from last year. So there must be some success along the way. Something such as that it's worth carrying on with the work. Well, in a sense, it's actually the successes that have demonstrated how enormous the task is.
So I mentioned there had been some early successes with rhinovirus, I think back in 1953 and again, this is from Guardian, an epidemiologist called Winston Price. He was working at the Johns Hopkins University in the US. And when a group of nurses came down with a cold, he cultured a sample from that to trial. So he did a trial with several hundred people and those that were vaccinated with the vaccine, he developed from this virus from his nurses, turned out they had eight times fewer colds than unvaccinated people.
So media across the world were excited. Have we turned a corner? Has the common cold been cured? His vaccine was only effective against that one strain that he developed in experiments after they did absolutely nothing.
And that's what indicated to the scientists of the day that there was more than one rhinovirus out there and they had to keep searching. And their knowledge progressed? Well, I'm sure that you've heard of the drug Interferon. It's used against some forms of cancer as well as strains of hepatitis and other viruses.
It's an interesting drug because it uses chemicals that already exist in the body to physically block the invading bacteria and stop it from colonizing cells. So what happens is the Interferon causes infected cells to basically start screaming that they've been invaded. I mean, literally it's like a signal. It's a messaging system.
And that tips off the surrounding cells to then go into protect mode and your body starts to manufacture its own antiviral treatment. That's why it's actually a really elegant kind of solution. So in the 1970s, it was hoped that Interferon could be used against the cold. And early tests showed promising signs again, but again, taking the information from the Guardian article, a review by the common cold unit in the UK in the 80s uncovered that there was a fatal flaw in the logic.
The Interferon only works if it's given to the patient at the same time as they get the virus. But that's not how things work in the real world. You don't realize when you've been infected because we don't know what infects us. We're kissing doesn't work.
We're having it standing naked in a corridor doesn't work. How do you actually catch this thing? So you only know when the symptoms show and that can be days later and that time, by that time, it's already way, way too late. The cold has already entered your mind, your body and your soul.
Is science ever going to beat the cold? It's the same kind of thing as I was saying last week. We shouldn't really focus on the negatives of this. If you want to find solutions to public health problems, then make it clear to the public health or the public representatives that you elect because, as I said, a lot of this is about resources.
We're not putting huge amounts of resources now into finding a cure for the cold. But research is going on. And one of the options going on right now is virus loading. And I don't know if I've used that term correctly.
But what they're looking at is finding the original version, which is finding a vaccine for each strain of the virus. So what they want to do is then combine all of those into a single injection. So you actually have the battle plan for 160 different types in that one shot. But the maximum number of serotypes we've actually managed to combine successfully in the past into one vaccine is only 23.
That jump from 23 to 160 is still going to take an awful lot of work. So perhaps it is going to be a case of looking at the numbers targeting the strains that cause the largest percentage of the illness. Because again, even killing off some cold is better than killing off no cold. And that's how optimism works.
All this talk about injections and jabs brings back some very recent memories of mine. I was thinking the Paltter Falls Met with it, doing another Met's meaning episode about why we can't cure the common cold, the FM 89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes.
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