Interferon - 50 years on

Despite its early promise, interferon has not turned out to be a miracle cure for virus infections. In this article in Microbiology Today, Rick Randall and Steve Goodbourn explain what is known now and what we still need to find out.

By understanding at the molecular level how viruses counteract the IFN response, new medicines and new ways of combating infections may be developed. For example, it is clear that if a virus fails to circumvent the IFN response it will be attenuated in vivo. Consequently, attenuated virus vaccines may be developed by specifically isolating viruses that are unable to circumvent the IFN response. This may be achieved either by genetically engineering viruses to knockout their IFN antagonists, or by selecting mutants that are sensitive to IFN. The fact that most viruses encode specific IFN antagonists also raises the possibility that novel antiviral drugs may be developed which block the activity of the viral antagonists.

Also in Microbiology Today, Derek Burke recalls his time as a researcher during the “steam age of virology”:

My first project was to determine the nucleic acid content of influenza virus, known to be an RNA virus, but how much RNA? Near its end, Alick suggested that I should help him “with something interesting that we are doing on interference”. “We” was Jean Lindenmann and himself, it was March 1957, and interferon was only a few weeks old. The name was new Alick once explained that it was “time that biologists had a fundamental particle, for the physicists have so many: electron, neutron, proton, etc.” That did not stop Lord Hailsham, then Chairman of the MRC, objecting to such a nasty hybrid word with both Latin and Greek roots! By then, though, the name had stuck.