Researchers Zero In On Protein That Destroys HIV 216
Julie188 writes with this excerpt from a Loyola University news release:
"Using a $225,000 microscope, researchers have identified the key components of a protein called TRIM5a that destroys HIV in rhesus monkeys. The finding could lead to new TRIM5a-based treatments that would knock out HIV in humans, said senior researcher Edward M. Campbell, PhD, of Loyola University Health System."
$225,000 (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like promising research, but I'm confused by why the cost of the microscope is prominently displayed in both the press release and TFS. Is $225,000 considered cheap or expensive for a microscope these days?
Re:Oblig Rodney Dangerfield (Score:5, Interesting)
The '70s will be back! You young guys are gonna love it, but the prostitutes will hate it. Back then, having sex with a woman was no bigger a deal than smoking a joint (that we were convinced would be legal once our generation took over... ha), and the best pickup line was "wanna fuck?" and women would come up to YOU and ask that.
AIDS killed it. If this works, you guys are in for some great times.
Re:Cheap microscope (Score:1, Interesting)
press releases lead to funding. putting a dollar amount in there will (they hope) elicit one of two responses: "wow, that's a lot of money and they did good work, let's give them more" or "wow, they'd do even better with a more expensive microscope."
Re:Cheap microscope (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect you're right. As for whether it's the right direction, I'm cautious. The virus mutates frighteningly fast and remarkably effectively. (Early vaccines failed because deactivated HIV could reactivate itself. That's bad.) If the researchers have shown the protein has remained effective on SIV in the wild, then it's safer ground - if a close cousin can't mutate around it, there's an excellent chance HIV can't either. As things stand, it's certainly the first candidate since the early vaccine trials that has shown a willingness to think along substantially new lines, and as such the first candidate I'm impressed by as a possibility. But until the numbers are crunched, it's not safe to anticipate. Many of the women believed to have been somehow immune to AIDS have since died from it, indicating that even sincere beliefs by experts isn't a guarantee of anything.
(I wonder if you could use a prion-based cure. The virus is protected by proteins, so disrupting the proteins may reduce their ability to hide. and/or reduce their effectiveness. Of course, it would also swiss-cheese the brain if the wrong prions were used, but there are only a couple of known prion diseases for humans and they have extremely long incubation periods and are extremely slow in their progression in comparison.)
Re:Cheap microscope (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the way you think. I like the idea of going after the protein capsid in a catalytic manner. The problem is prions are very odd and rare things in themselves.
Technically speaking, a prion protein has to have a diseased-conformation with a lower thermodynamic energy minima than the the healthy version, otherwise it would require energy input, and thus be non-catalytic. Since most proteins are already folded to minimum energy, it's unlikely you can find a lower energy conformation that has catalytic activity for a HIV protein such as GP120 (or any other protein for that matter).
BTW, some researchers don't believe prions are really prions. They believe a small amount of genetic material may lay hidden. These researchers aren't crackpots and demonstrating the presence of DNA/RNA inside would explain a lot of weird stuff that can't be explained when it comes to prions.
Re:So which drug company is going to buy the (Score:4, Interesting)
That depends on what you call a "cure". You probably carry hundreds of nearly dormant viruses around that your body can never get rid of. Yet, you wouldn't consider yourself "ill".
If they can introduce TRIM5a into human cells and get it expressed, people would end up not needing drugs, not being infectious, and not having any symptoms. That's about as "cured" as you are of many other viral diseases.