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SARS

Description
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a severe respiratory illness that has recently been reported in Asia, North America, and Europe. SARS is a viral illness that is most often spread from person to person by close physical contact and through respiratory secretions. For instance, a SARS patient coughs or sneezes. Those droplets are infected with SARS. If another person comes in contact with those secretions then touches their own eyes, nose, mouth or other mucous membranes, they can become infected. In general, SARS begins with a fever greater than 100.4F. Other symptoms may include headache, an overall feeling of discomfort, and body aches. Some people may also experience mild respiratory symptoms. After 2 to 7 days, SARS patients may develop a dry cough and have trouble breathing.

Who is at Risk?
Cases of SARS continue to be reported mainly among people who have had direct close contact with an infected person, such as those sharing a household with a SARS patient and health-care workers who did not use infection control procedures while taking care of a SARS patient.

Sources: About, Inc., Occupational Safety and Health Administration

TSRI Scientists Find Compounds that Effectively Inhibit SARS Virus
The SARS virus that emerged in a remote region of Southern China about two years ago quickly spread to more than two dozen countries, infected some 8,000 people, and claimed nearly 800 lives before it was contained through public health strategies of monitoring, reporting, and isolating cases. However, there are no specific drugs for SARS or for containing the SARS virus specifically. Recently, an effort to find compounds that might be effective against the SARS virus was undertaken by a team of scientists from TSRI and Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The effort was led by TSRI Professor Chi-Huey Wong, Ph.D., Ernest W. Hahn Professor and Chair in Chemistry.

Wong and his colleagues used a high-throughput screen in which they infected monkey kidney cells in culture with SARS and screened some 10,000 compounds for their ability to protect cells from dying. Included in these 10,000 compounds were drugs that have been approved for treating other diseases, ginseng and about 1,000 other traditional Chinese herbs, chemicals that inhibit a class of enzymes known as proteases, and synthetic compounds such as compounds Wong assembled using a technique he invented called one-pot synthesis. Out of this library of 10,000 compounds, the scientists found about 50 that offered the cells some protective effect against the SARS virus.

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Attacking an Epidemic
A group of scientists, led by TSRI Associate Professor Peter Kuhn, Ph.D., is applying proteomics, the study of proteins, to various pathogens, including the SARS virus. Their goal is to find new targets for the next generation of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines. Kuhn's group has set out to catalog the different proteins the SARS-CoV makes, determine what role these proteins play in the viral life cycle, and figure out how these proteins interact with human proteins within the cells that SARS-CoV infects. They are applying a state-of-the-art molecular approach to attacking the disease. SARS-CoV encodes about 28 proteins - some of their functions are known, but lots of them are unknown.

As a starting point, Kuhn and his colleagues have been trying to produce the various SARS-CoV proteins that help the viruses infect, replicate, assemble new virus particles, and escape to infect more cells. The scientists are making rapid progress and already have solved structures. As part of the project, TSRI scientists have teamed with scientists from PARC Institute for Advanced Biomedical Sciences to look for interactions between SARS-CoV proteins and to screen for potential inhibitors of viral enzymes, by using an enthalpy array that works with sample sizes significantly less than might be required with traditional instruments of this type.

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