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Hopes of a wholly artificial polio vaccine

An international team of scientists is to try to develop a wholly artificial vaccine to combat polio. The disease is very close to being eradicated, but the hope is that the new approach can address some shortcomings in an existing vaccine, and so help eliminate polio altogether.

BBC News reports that the World Health Organisation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are providing a $674,000 grant and researchers in the US and the UK will participate.

Professor Dave Stuart from Oxford University and member of the team said: "The idea of the synthetic vaccine is that it contains no genome – it's virus free."

The team feels it is already some way down the road to achieving its goal because of the success it had in developing a synthetic vaccine to combat the foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV). But one of the obstacles the team had to overcome in producing the FMDV solution was to find a way to maintain the shape of the particle when it had no genetic material inside.

Stuart explained: "There are problems because if you try to make something that looks like the virus but doesn’t contain the genome, it tends to be more fragile. "We had to use a detailed knowledge of how the atoms in this complicated structure were arranged to then go in and do some molecular re-engineering to make it more stable, so that it could hang around long enough to induce enough protective response from the immune system."

[link url="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31468224"]Full BBC News report[/link]

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