The key to this potential cure was reportedly discovered by accident. In 2004, an Israeli researcher named Beka Solomon was conducting Alzheimer’s trials when she stumbled onto a new therapy that reduced the brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s by an astounding eighty percent. That made it far more effective than any treatment on the market.
But Solomon had actually begun her trials with a focus on a completely different therapy. She had genetically engineered mice to develop Alzheimer’s and was treating the mice with a human-derived antibody, which she administered via their nasal passages. The problem was, her therapy didn’t effectively cross the blood-brain barrier and reach the plaques in the parts of the brain affected by Alzheimer’s. In what might go down as one of the greatest twists of scientific luck, Solomon decided to attach her antibody to a virus called M13 to transport it across the blood-brain barrier.
M13 was a special type of virus called a bacteriophage—a virus that infected only bacteria. And M13 infected only one type of bacteria: Escherichia coli, or E. coli. To Solomon’s surprise, the antibody, when attached to M13, showed great success in her trials. But what was truly surprising was that the group of mice treated with the M13 virus alone—without Solomon’s antibody therapy—also showed incredible improvement. It seemed that the positive outcomes from the trials were due entirely to M13, not to Solomon’s actual antibody therapy.
After a year of treatment, the mice that received M13 had, on average, less than a fourth of the plaques of those in the control group. Subsequent experiments showed that M13 could also dissolve other amyloid aggregates—the tau tangles found in Alzheimer’s and the amyloid plaques associated with other diseases, including alpha-synuclein (Parkinson’s), huntingtin (Huntington’s disease), and superoxide dismutase (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). The M13 phage even worked against the amyloids in prion diseases, a class that included Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The discovery was startling and represented a potentially huge breakthrough in the fight against neurodegenerative diseases.
Thus began the long process of trying to figure out how M13 did its miraculous work. After years of research, scientists discovered it was actually a set of proteins—called GP3—on the tip of the M13 virus that was the key to its incredible ability. The GP3 proteins essentially enabled M13 to attach to E. coli and unzip the bacteria, allowing M13 to inject its own DNA inside for replication. And by a stroke of sheer luck, the GP3 proteins also unlocked clumps of misfolded proteins found in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and other diseases.
Desmond turned this information over in his mind. He had no doubt that Rapture Therapeutics was a large part of the puzzle. It was, after all, their employee—Gunter Thorne—he’d found dead in his hotel room.
Maybe the answers would come tomorrow, at the meeting.
He closed the Rapture Therapeutics site and returned to the web search he’d done on himself. But the remaining links were of no help. He had no social media presence, and the other links were just articles about companies he was involved in or videos of him speaking at conferences or appearing in video interviews. His entire life seemed to be limited to his professional involvement in high-tech startups.
Next he did an internet search for Peyton Shaw. When he had called her that morning, she had known who he was. If he could find out who she was, and how she knew him, it might give him a clue to his own identity.
He learned that she was a leading field epidemiologist for the CDC. That was interesting. Was she somehow involved with Rapture Therapeutics? It seemed unlikely; her focus was infectious diseases.
He pulled up a video of Peyton Shaw giving a speech at the American Public Health Summit a few months before. She appeared on his screen, standing on a wide stage with a white background. Her white skin was silky smooth, her hair dark brown and shoulder length. She was clearly of European descent, but Desmond guessed there was an East Asian somewhere in her immediate family tree. She was thin and moved about the stage easily, with the grace of someone who did yoga or danced regularly.
It was her eyes that Desmond focused on, however. They were large and bright and radiated an indescribable quality that he found instantly captivating. She wasn’t gorgeous, not a woman who would turn heads, but as he watched her, he was irresistibly drawn to her. She possessed that certain charm that comes from confidence and being comfortable in one’s own skin. And as she spoke, he realized something else: she was incredibly intelligent. Desmond didn’t know what type of woman he had dated before, but if he were to choose at that moment, it would be someone like Peyton Shaw.
On the projection screen behind her, an image appeared of a field hospital in a rural, tropical area—likely somewhere in the third world.
“Humanity is fighting a war,” she said to an unseen audience. “It is a global war—a war that has raged since our ancestors took their first steps. It may never end. This war has no borders, no treaties, no ceasefire. Our enemy lives among us. It is invisible, immortal, always adapting—and testing our defenses for weakness.
“It strikes when we least expect it. It kills and maims indiscriminately. It will attack any person, of any nation, race, or religion. Our immortal enemy is in this room. It is inside you. And me. That enemy is the pathogens that each and every one of us carries.
“For the most part, we live in an uncomfortable equilibrium with bacteria and viruses, both those inside of us and those outside, in the natural world. But every now and then, the war reignites. An old pathogen, long dormant, returns. A new mutation emerges. Those events are the epidemics and pandemics we confront. They are the battles we fight.