Runny noses, sneezes, coughs, sore throats. The common cold is such a staple of modern life that one often doesn’t consider that it may ever go away. However, a new treatment, UK scientists said, may be the method that everyone’s been hoping for to finally be able to effectively combat the common cold.

Normally, the common cold is caused by viruses, rather than bacteria, who infect cells throughout the body and use them to multiply. Symptoms such as coughing and mucus are the body’s immunization response. However, rather than combating the virus as many have tried to do in years past, the scientists are looking at a cause that’s easier to battle: the human body itself. Targeting and disabling certain enzymes that cold viruses use to self-replicate just might stop the virus in its tracks, they say.

“Viruses hijack the host to make more copies of themselves,” said visiting professor at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London and a co-author of the study Roberto Solari. “This enzyme is one of the host enzymes that the virus hijacks.”

While the idea of targeting the host as opposed to the virus is a new idea, as said by co-author Ed Tate, it would be more effective since targeting these specific viruses is a goal that science has tried and failed to effectively meet previously.

“Even if the cold has taken hold, it still might help lessen the symptoms,” Tate said. “This could be really helpful for people with health conditions like asthma, who can get quite ill when they catch a cold.”

However, he said that if the medication is taken before the symptoms of a cold begin to crop up, which is when infection first takes hold, it may prevent the cold from developing at all. Unfortunately, even if a cure for the common cold arrives, it may be a long way off.

“We haven’t done any animal studies, and we obviously haven’t done any studies in humans, so I can’t tell you formally what the animal toxicity of this compound is,” Solari said. “There is a still a long way before this becomes a medicine.”

Ultimately, the team isn’t sure whether the medicine will be effective by the time the actual symptoms of a cold crops up, typically a few days after the initial infection; or, for that matter, whether it’s safe to take as a preventative measure – if at all. It may in fact be limited to those who actually are at risk from the common cold.

“Rhinovirus, the common cold virus, in healthy people is pretty trivial – you have the runny nose, you have a bit of a temperature, you don’t feel well for two or three days, but you get over it,” Solari said.