The summary below was shared in a field email sent from our highly regarded sales leader and Professer of Biochemistry & Biophysics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill   Dr. Stephan Chaney

While clinical studies are the gold standard for determining the effectiveness of a drug or a nutrient, it is sometimes difficult to avoid animal studies if you want to determine how that drug or nutrient works. Those those basic “mechanism of action” studies are often a necessary prelude to the clinical studies.

That is why my companies commitment not to use any animal studies in the testing of their products is so important.

If you are passionate about reducing the use of animals in research, you will be particularly impressed with my companies latest research project.

My company wanted to do some basic research on how our natural interferon works to prevent viral infections in the lung. So they contacted scientists at Cornell University to do those experiments.

They contacted those particular scientists to do the experiments because they were world experts in thefield of immunology, and they were world experts in the development of model systems that can be used in the place of animal studies.

The scientists asked our company if they would first support their research in developing an animal-free model system for determining how the airway epithelium (in layman’s terms this refers to the layers of cells that line the lungs and windpipe) responds to viral infections.

We of course agreed to support the research at Cornell in developing a model of the human airway epithelium – even though that research itself did not involve any of our wellness products and was, therefore, of no direct benefit to our company.

The Cornell scientists have published their first paper using this human airway epithelium (HAE) model system.
(Palmero et al., Journal of Virology, 83: 6900-6908).

That particular paper showed how the lungs respond to a particular type of parainfluenza virus that is responsible for croup and bronchitis in children

Our companies support in the development of the HAE model system was acknowledged in that paper and will be acknowledged in all future papers using that model system.

Of course, the research didn’t stop there. Our company also supported a research project by the same scientists to determine how our natural interferon helps the lungs resist infection by flu viruses.

I can’t release all of the results of that study yet because the study has not yet been published. But I can tell you that the study showed that our natural interferon activates “natural killer cells” when a flu virus
infects lung tissue.

This is a significant finding because, as their name suggests, natural killer cells play an important role in “killing” the flu virus.  We already knew that our natural interferon helped fight viral infections, but we didn’t know how. This research is an important part of the proof that our product is effective.

In Summary:

1) My company has supported fundamental research at Cornell University into the development of a model system that allows scientists to test how human lung tissue responds to viral infections – and without the use of animals.

2) This study is significant in itself because it will allow scientists across the world to answer important scientific questions that can not be addressed in
clinical trials – and the lives of many thousands of laboratory animals will be spared in the process.

3) This is yet another example of our companiescommitment to supporting research that advances scientific knowledge - not just research that can be used in the marketing of their products. This commitment to true
science is unique among food supplement companies.

4) These same scientist went on to use this model system to show that our natural interferon protects human lung tissue from viral infection by activating natural killer cells which destroy the virus.

5) This provides even stronger evidence of the effectiveness of our product by showing how it works.

P. S. I’m sure that some of you are going to ask me about the swine flu.

This study was not done with swine flu virus, so it does not provide direct evidence that natural inteferon will protect against the swine flu.

However, you should know that natural killer cells are not particularly choosy. They destroy every virus that they come across.

Thus, I consider our natural interferon to be an important part of everyone’s health plan to reduce the risk of coming down with the swine flu.