Question: Do you think there will ever be a cure for the common cold?

Natt Day answered on 20 Jun 2015:

The problem with the virus that causes the cold (Rhinovirus) is that at the moment there are over 100 different strains that have been identified floating around the population. All of these strains work in very similar ways, but they have slight different variations of their surface proteins which means our bodies are unable to immediately recognise and destroy them upon contact– which is why we catch colds so often. It’s also been shown that Rhinoviruses are prone to a process we call antigenic drift/shift in which their surface proteins mutate slightly so they are different and it leads to the body not recognising them again. Baring all this in mind it seems very unlikely that we’ll be able to fully cure the common cold.

However there is some hope! There are four proteins that make up the outer packaging of the Rhinovirus– these are called the capsid proteins. We used to think that all the capsid proteins were slightly different between all the strains, but recent research shows that actually one of these capsid proteins named VP4 is actually very similar in a lot of strains. And so we’ve started to try to develop a vaccine against it… Which may lead to us being able to vaccinate against many of the current Rhinovirus strains!