With bird flu back in the news and the movie "Contagion" opening in theaters Friday, experts say the threat of a lethal virus encircling the globe is more real now than ever. But so are the efforts to stop it.
A lethal disease breaks out, spreads quickly, kills its victims within days. Next comes widespread panic and a rush to find a way to stop the pandemic. That's the movie version.
Far from Hollywood, at an unassuming building in Bothell, AVI BioPharma has been doing work that could come straight from the pages of a screenplay, starting with penguins and West Nile virus in 2002. CEO Chris Garabedian says that was the company's first real-life challenge.
"We were able to produce a drug to target West Nile virus, got it turned around very quickly, sent it to the Wisconsin zoo and they were able to treat and save the remaining penguins," he said.
Then in 2004, the company was called in after a defense researcher might have been exposed to the deadly Ebola virus, after a needle stick. The team turned around a drug in five days, a drug that didn't need to be used, after all, but got the company noticed.
"That's what intrigued the Department of Defense to say--wow--if you have the capability to do that, let's test this, let's study Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic viruses first. Then they said let's do a rapid response with pandemic influenza. We did that in seven days. They said-- wow. They keep upping the ante," said Garabedian
Now the assignment is decoding mystery viruses and bacteria, and coming up with drugs to disarm them. Think of it as war games for germs.
Lead researcher Patrick Iversen explained that it's an assault launched at the genetic level.
"In some ways the technology is really simple. The genetIc code has four letters: A,C.G and T," he said
The goal is finding the right sequence to target, much like finding the key sentence in a book.
"That sentence conveys the idea that they're building the whole rest of the book on. I'm just going to search and replace and delete that sentence. That's what were trying to do with the virus. So everything downstream that sentence doesn't make sense anymore. the book, the idea fails, " he said.
Result-- the virus can't replicate. Unlike the movie where the search is on for a vaccine that could take months, even years to develop and test, Garabedian says their turnaround time is much quicker.
"So we've proven we can produce a drug very quickly and once we have the manufacturing scale there, it's not unrealistic to think that we could be part of the solution for unforeseen viruses and bacteria that emerge later on."
This could be one case where the science is slightly ahead of the science fiction. However, the real-life version of this story has yet to be told.
AVI BioPharma is also involved in drug development for rare diseases including Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.
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