Anti-HIV Virus Developed 750
liam193 writes "Wired News is reporting that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may have developed a virus that fights the HIV virus. According to the article, 'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'"
Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this proves effective, I can anticipate people who'll get the treatment, then use that as another item on their list of "why you should have unsafe sex with me tonight". That may be a more entertaining way for more people to get "treated" than visiting their doctors, but HIV isn't the only nasty little bugger out there. We could end up with an epidemic of hepatitis and other STDs.
"I can't say now it won't make it worse," Arkin said.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Interesting)
But here's what i've always been curious about - what they invented a STD that made your penis longer, or one that made your breasts larger (depending on gender). This really could be the wave of the future - certain people becoming sexually appealing due to designer viruses they carry.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Funny)
I neither want larger breasts or for my SO to devlop a penis of ANY size. Takes the romance out of it.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, a computer with a penis would be rather silly.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:4, Interesting)
if she had had a y chromosome instead, the hole would have been covered by a sac and that clit lengthened. in fact, as an embryo in the pouch, you had a clitoris yourself. you can't touch the clit directly just as it is painful to rub the "head" of a man if he is not aroused. take some notes, it's all psychological behaviour that is making you want to fuck your SO. Otherwise you are both basically the same with only a few freak mutations that happen to work in your favor.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Funny)
So then I says to her:
Babe. I figure with my enlarged genital region, and your enlarged breast region, we might be able to complement each others deficiencies quite nicely. So what do you say? Why not go out with me?
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Funny)
On a side note, I told my wife last night, "honey, I can't have just one pussy for the rest of my life! I need more pussy than that," and she said, "Hey, if you were a little bigger, you'd have more pussy right here!"
So I looked into it, and the average pussy is eight inches deep, while the average penis is only six inches long. That means that two inches of pussy are wasted, on average, with every coital thrust. The average sex act lasts three minutes, with 30 thrusts per minute, adding up to 180 inches of wasted pussy per sex act, which happens on average three times per week. Multiply that by 52 weeks, and divide by the number of inches in a mile (63,360) and we find that there is nearly half a mile of wasted pussy per woman per year! Figuring approximately 100 million American women of legal age, that means, as a country, we are wasting around half a million miles of pussy every year, while some men here go without!
I call on all true patriotic American men and women to do something about this travesty.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh come on, that's just pathetic. It takes me more than three minutes when I'm by myself!
Brav-o, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Soon I'll find messages in my inbox with the subject:
Tap in2 half a million miles of surplus p.u.s.s.y with our product!
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:4, Funny)
> that the penis is a variation on the clitoris.
> Using that logic, however, I'm still stumped
> on why the pee-hole goes through it
It's one of the arguments against Creationist "Intelligent Design". What f-ing engineer would run sewer lines through a recreational area?
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:4, Informative)
labia major, and vaginal canal on a woman becomes, on a man, the shaft of the penis.
The homologous (i.e same) tissue as the labia majora of females becomes the scrotal sac in males. Remember back when you were a young kid and you had a big ridge going down the mid-line of your sac? That was the fusion line of the two "lips".
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait, I'm sorry, was it the overuse of the word 'pussy?' Pussy pussy pussy! Which is more pussy than you'll ever see, with a sense of humor like that.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:3, Interesting)
There've been a few cases of a doctor using the "I've been injected with the cure for <insert fictional disease that patient supposedly has> and the only way for you to get it is to have sex with me" line. This may be the first time that it's true!
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:3, Funny)
You've gotta be kidding me (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You've gotta be kidding me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Interesting)
That may be true, but I support any technology that makes it easier for slashdoters to get laid.
In all seriousness though, this is very very cool. Anyone interested in the original HIV genome (it's like sourcecode) can find it here. [nih.gov]
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Funny)
Sweet- open source genomes! Do they accept patches? I really want to write a 1337 alpha-channel-transparency feature for HIV. HIV has a big install base, but I think it would be bigger if it was prettier to look at. Also, some videoconferencing support would rock.
You spelled it wrong (Score:5, Funny)
All your base (Score:5, Interesting)
the lathe of heaven (Score:4, Informative)
I think you're talking about a DNA Microarray.
It allows you to get the expression profile of the cell. More info here [nih.gov].
Flash tutorial here [davidson.edu].
Interestingly enough, it's the reverse transcriptases that are used by viruses like HIV to embed themselves in our genome that allowed cDNA technology and therefore Microarray technology to become a reality. We could have made the complimentary DNA strands that the messenger RNA binds to using other methods, but it would have been much harder.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Informative)
Eh, no.
The virus that they have invented can only survive if the HIV virus is present in the body. If you have no HIV in your body the "good" virus will simply die out.
"Hey baby, I have HIV, but don't worry, I also have the good virus." ... Somehow I don't think that line will get you laid.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:5, Interesting)
But they also said that it there's no garauntee that it won't combine itself with HIV and create something magnatudes worse.
They are essentially the same basic virus, just with the active bits changed. A new mutant virus is not just possible, but likely. I would hold off and watch this new treatment very closely... if I had any reason to.
Re:Hey, babe, I got the cure... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hepatitis cure may be here! (Score:5, Informative)
HIV is a double stranded DNA virus. Very different and it uses the cells own DNA polimerase to replicate itself and create teh proteins for the new virus. Very different.
If you were a bio major, you would know that HIV is a retrovirus [wikipedia.org], which carries its genome in RNA, and uses reverse transcriptase to copy itself into DNA.
Re:Hepatitis cure may be here! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hepatitis cure may be here! (Score:5, Insightful)
HIV is a lentivirus, a subcategory of the retroviruses. HIV virions package two, negative strand RNA molecules. Within a cell, the HIV reverse transcriptase synthesizes cDNA that integrates into the host cell. The low replication fidelity of the reverse transcriptase is what accounts for HIV's incredible ability to rapidly escape from drug treatment and immune responses.
Unfortunately, the Wired article doesn't provide many scientific details. The idea is pretty creative, but there is a huge difference between simulating a cure (and even making one in a test tube) and finding a cure that works in animals. A few concerns off the top of my head:
1) Recombination between HIV and the treatment vector. Remember those two strands of RNA I talked about above? You can get mosaic viruses that resemble part of one virus and a second part of another. I'd be willing to bet that this is the 'it could make things worse' aspect mentioned at the botom of the article.
2) Any time you insert foreign DNA into the genomic DNA of cels (as would occur with this anti-HIV, if I understand it correctly), bad things can happen.
3) Attenuating (or weakening) HIV has been widely tested as a vaccine. And basically, it works, at least in monkeys. If you give monkeys an attenuated version of SIV (monkey AIDS virus), the monkeys are basically protected against full-blown SIV. So why isn't this a vaccine that is being used in people? Monkeys that have weakened immune systems, are young, are old, or just have plain bad luck eventually get sick and die...from the attenuated strain of the virus. In other words, the attenuated vaccine makes the monkeys sick. The 'anti-HIV' sounds like a different riff on the same theme, with the possible caveat that they are looking to use it on people who are already infected, unlike a vaccine which would be used on uninfected people to prevent infection.
Just my two cents. My cred: 8 years in HIV research, with a Ph.D. in it.
Re:Hepatitis cure may be here! (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent down - misinfomation (Score:4, Informative)
HIV is a double stranded DNA virus
Parent should be modded down for misinformation: this is plain wrong, HIV is a RNA virus with DNA in its reproduction pathway. Of the different hepatitis viruses, some are based on DNA (with RNA in their reproduction pathway -- hep.B) and some others are based on RNA. I hope the parent poster does a whole lot more revision before his exams
-wb-
Re:Hepatitis cure may be here! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm curious, do you mean American English [m-w.com]? Because according to the dictionary defining American English, you are wrong. You are also wrong according to Dictionary.com [reference.com]. You are also wrong according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. The correct plural of virus, in American English (I don't have a copy of the official Oxford English Dictionary, which defines British English), is viruses. The use of the term virii originated in the 90s on warez sites/forums.
Re:Hepatitis cure may be here! (Score:5, Informative)
The confusion doesn't end there though. There is no example of the word virus being pluralized in any classical works. This wouldn't be a problem except that virus is an irregular noun. It's a neuter noun that is declined like a masculine second declension noun (except the accusative case which is also virus). In Latin (and Greek as well) neuter nouns have plurals that end in -a. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. This is one of the most reliable rules in Latin (and in Latin most rules have very few exceptions in the first place). As such viri can't be the plural of virus either.
Then there are some people who upon hearing that virus is neuter mistake it for a third declension neuter noun and say that the plural of virus should be virora just as the plural of corpus is corpora. However, this cannot be the case since virus is known to have the genitive singular form viri and if it were a third declension noun it would have the form viroris.
Then there are other people who say that virus is a fourth declension noun but this doesn't make much sense since the genitive form doesn't match what would be expected for a fourth declension noun and as for as I know all fourth declension neuter nouns end in -u and not -us.
My best guess is that the plural of virus would be virus since this follows the pattern of other second declension neuter nouns with gender confusion issues. However, it's probably best to avoid all of this confusion and just pluralize it as viruses.
And now you know. And knowing is half the battle.
Re:Hepatitis cure may be here! (Score:4, Informative)
Oops, typo. What I meant to say is that the plural of virus would probably be vira.
Would post editing really be that bad of a thing? It could work if all moderations were nullified and you were allowed to see earlier revisions of the post.
Re:Hepatitis cure may be here! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hepatitis cure may be here! (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly.
For everyone looking at the latin virus explanation post and going "HOLY CRAP!!!1!", it's really not that bad. This is honestly 2nd year high school latin at best, and probably stuff that you'd hit in 1st semester latin at a university. I know when I took greek, first semester was all about declining nouns - the prof. wanted to get that down before we went to tenses, which are harder.
I hope this helps, if not to explain it, to at least show that what he's doing is not that bad.
In English, we conjugate verbs all the time - it's second nature. It allows us to understand that "are our children learning?" is correct, when "is our children learning?" is not, because in this case, "children" is plural, and "children" is also the subject (remember, to find the subject of a question, you have to turn it into a statement, i.e. "are our children learning? -> "our children are learning").
Well, in Latin and Greek, the same thing is done with nouns. You conjugate nouns. Except that it's called declining nouns. Verbs conjugate, nouns decline, and difficult students decline to conjugate.
So, in Latin, when you say,
"The boy built the tower" and
"The boy gave the tower a roof" and
"The tower fell down",
the word for tower is spelled differently, because of where it's used in the sentence.
In the first case, it's the direct object, receiving the action of the verb. In the second case, it's the indirect object, describing something about the direct object (which is roof). In both of these cases, you could say that the tower is in the objective case. Latin and Greek just call that accusative. In the third example, the tower is the subject of the sentence, which is just called the nominative case.
And there are other cases, which do get a little more in depth, like the genitive case. But, if you think about it, genitive is from the greek genesis, meaning a begining, and the genitive case is used with nouns "comming from" somewhere, whether it's actual travel, or an abstract idea like love comming from god (there's a lot of genitive in the greek new testament).
Keep in mind that this isn't as foreign as it sounds to English speakers. We do it on a limited basis with pronouns: He gave me the ball, vs. I gave the ball to him.
So that's really all there is to it. When the virus guy is posting about declinations, all he means is ways to decline nouns. We group them into first, second, thrid, etc, based on how they decline, much the way people group verbs when they study a foreign language. And the concept of gendered nouns is very much still in use - spanish and french still have masculine and feminine nouns, as do a host of other languages, and german has neuter nouns as well.
It's not that bad. Give those dead languages a fair chance.
~Will
Re:children of HIV positive couple (Score:5, Insightful)
Hence, a seropositive male almost always produces seronegative offspring, assuming the mother is not infected. It would be unusual for a fetus ever to acquire HIV infection directly from the father. The developing embryo simply does not have the CD4+ receptor that HIV latches on to, until much later in development.
HIV transmission is not like Mendelian genetics.I volunteer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I volunteer (Score:5, Funny)
Here's a hint: you won't be using your hands.
...and I hope you swing both ways, because that's what it'll take.
Re:I volunteer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I volunteer (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory Family Guy Quote
[Peter] Ah Jeez, where am I gonna get $50000?
[Quagmire] Well, you could whore yourself out to 1000 fat chicks for $50 each - or 50 really fat chicks for $1000 a piece!
* Everyone looks a Quagmire
[Quagmire] Hey. Don't look at me like that. Fat chicks need love too. They just gotta pay for it.
[Sailor - All Peg arms and legs] (Talking about the $50000 reward to catch a fish named "Daggermouth") I saw Daggermouth. Sure. I may have been really tired, and my eyes were sore from rubbing them too much, and I was swimming in a pool with too much chlorine in it, and it was the hour my glasses were at lenscrafters, but I swear it was him...
Or of course, you could just whore yourself out to 1000 fat chicks...
[Quagmire] (Interrupting) No we covered that already.
Re:I volunteer (Score:5, Funny)
Too late, man. What do you think they needed the grad student for?
Awesome (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Funny)
Don't count your chickens ... (Score:5, Informative)
Seven years ago, a custom rhabdovirus (rabies) [cell.com] for selectively killing HIV-infected cells had my biotechnolgy professor all excited, but nobody's heard from them for a while since it didn't work in whole organisms.
(Why yes, I _am_ a molecular biologist....)
Shouldn't Scare (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should this scare anybody? Alot of discoveries are just happenstance, or maybe it took somebody to think outside of the box, or maybe they are super geniuses [pioneernet.net]
My point is, if you can call it that, is that it doesn't always take a 50 Billion dollar military grant to come up with something to change the world. Ask the guy that invented the wheel.
Re:Shouldn't Scare (Score:5, Insightful)
Ebola-Cold. (Score:5, Informative)
The reason Ebola doesn't spread very far is because it has a short incubation period, and kills very quickly. The infected don't have much of a chance to transmit it outside of the local populace---an outbreak can be identified and contained.
Contrast this with HIV, which has a tremendous incubation period, meaning that even though it's very difficult to transmit, it's spread terribly.
--grendel drago
RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what's scary is that they've developed a treatment that spreads itself just like a virus, along with HIV. What that means is that once it's in the wild, it's gonna spread like any other virus and, probably, mutate like any other virus.
That's an ethical conundrum from hell - is it moral to infect people with a virus of unknown long-term effects that cures a known killer disease?
Re:Shouldn't Scare (Score:5, Funny)
Adjusted for inflation back to 100000 B.C., the wheel cost $750 billion to develop.
He was the Bill Ug of his day.
Re:Shouldn't Scare (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Shouldn't Scare (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, the article specifically mentions that the 'anti-HIV' virus is essentially a euphemism for gene therapy. Sure, it only takes $200k to solve the problem when you don't count the research dollars spent getting you to the point where 'viral' gene therapy is possible.
Something about giants and shoulders comes to mind...
Re:Shouldn't Scare (Score:3, Funny)
Once you adjust for inflation, the committee that designed the original wheel for $47,000 Atlantean dollars cost a little over $73 Billion US dollars. Of course, they didn't even tip the waiter who read over their shoulder and suggested they use a circle instead of the original triangle shape.
--
Evan "It's True!"
Re:Shouldn't Scare (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shouldn't Scare (Score:5, Informative)
Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wait... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Lisa: "But isn't that a bit shortsited? What happens when we're overrun by the anti-HIV virus?"
Skinner: "No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the the anti-HIV virus."
Lisa: "But aren't the snakes even worse?"
Skinner: "Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat."
Lisa: "But then we're stuck with gorillas!"
Skinner: "No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death."
Oh, wonderful. A new way to spread viral payloads (Score:4, Insightful)
No good for slashdotters... (Score:5, Funny)
Dont worry guys... it will be available in tablet form soon...
Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ambiguous language (Score:5, Funny)
Did they USE $200,000 and a grad student, or did they EXPEND $200,000 and a grad student? An important distinction, especially from the grad student's perspective.
Distinction what distinction? (Score:5, Funny)
Speaking as a grad student, after 5-7 years of 60+ hour work weeks and dealing with all the crap that grad school entails while making next to nothing you're both "used" and "expended."
Obvius (Score:3, Interesting)
Usual 'Wired' hype.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The facts: A pair of researchers have managed to adapt HIV to a virus which fights HIV. It's not their idea (as far as I can see), and so far they've only tested it in computer simulations (which are basically not to be trusted as a good model of the human immune system, trust me, I do computational biochem), also they've killed HIV in a petri dish.
Killing HIV in a petri dish is not new, there's quite a few things that do that.
I'm not dismissing the idea, but y'all better keep those champange bottles on ice for a few years until the in vivo studies have been conducted.
Really now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Developing a potential treatment for AIDS is, after all, relatively easy. Doing all of the studies necessary before releasing an engineered virus into the wild, now that's both difficult and expensive. Very difficult, and very expensive, in terms of highly dangerous controlled tests, especially over large amounts of time.
Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's because I'm not medically inclined, but this doesn't scare me at all. (Assuming this reads like "It scares them that they were able to do it so cheaply with so few people")
a.) Lots of research has already been done, it's unlikely that he had to start on square one. I don't think it's fair to assume that the money and time spent by other researchers didn't give this guy an advantage.
b.) How do we know he didn't just have a great inspiration after watching other failures and take a gamble on it? I can't say I've kept up on this, but this is the first time I've heard of anybody trying to use a virus to kill a virus. (I've heard the theory, but I understood that there was concern over what happens to the new virus...)
I don't think it's so shocking, but maybe those feelings are muted by the idea that maybe a lot of people in Africa will be able to look forward to a long healthy life.
We've heard of similar snake oils (Score:4, Insightful)
$200K is not enough to test that mutations will be stopped. And if HIV didn't mutate so tenaciously, we would have had a cure years ago.
Remember the "vaccine" based on a "crippled" HIV virus unable to cause the disease. Test it on monkeys and give it some time, and it turns out it "uncripples" itself by mutation once in a while. Ooops! Good thing that never made it to human trials! HIV sucks.
Just because a virus is artificial doesn't mean it's going to be controllable.
Grad Student (Score:5, Funny)
Since no animal testing was mentioned, I would like to extend my condolences to the grad student's family. It may seem like a great sacrifice, but just think of all the data gathered from the autopsy.
This remainds me of... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is this scary? (Score:5, Interesting)
Transmissible gene therapy has some awesome potential, and the fact that such limited resources could pull it off is all the more inredible.
The flip side of this is of course the potential for insanely destructive devices [wired.com] in the hands of anyone with a decent budget and some technical bioengineering skill.
Technological advances are going to drive the price point for this technology down ever further. In 10 years, should we be concerned if $5,000 in supplies and computing equipment allows this same feat to be accomplished?
It's going to start getting very interesting as the decades roll by. The ever increasing and incredible capabilities that these technologies provide are a double edged sword. They will be used for great good, but you can be sure more malicious uses will also be employed...
Still isn't a cure (Score:3, Insightful)
So don't throw out the rubbers just yet.
Re:Still isn't a cure (Score:4, Insightful)
And while you will still have HIV, it would reduce the amount of it in the blood stream (current drugs can get it down below 40 copies/mL blood, while untreated there can be millions of copies in a mL of blood), which reduces the risk of transmission, sexual or otherwise. You still wouldn't want to go around having unprotected sex, but it would help prevent transmission through accidental blood contact (not uncommon for those in medical professions).
What about a mutant 'treatment' ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, I'm not kidding. One of the difficulties researchers encounter is the constantly-changing nature of HIV. I don't know if this a very trustable approach.
arrogance and/or ignorance (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, some computer scientists discover biology and think they thought of things nobody ever thought of before. "Synthetic biology" is as old as molecular biology--that's what all those wonderful tools Arkin is playing around with were developed for. That's why he can buy the enzymes, chemicals, cell lines, DNA, and other components from dozens of vendors. Furthermore, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and other non-biologists, have been looking at biological problems for decades, so crossing disciplines is hardly new.
So, Arkin's general approach (as well as the general approach of the whole "synthetic biology" crowd) is nothing new. It is possible that he has come up with a specific new mechanism for interfering with HIV, but plenty of thought has gone into the careful design of similar schemes before and they have failed to work in humans.
Arkin may or may not have done some decent science in this work. But it foremost sounds like an attempt to grab attention. And that isn't nice: it not just detracts from other good research, in the case of proclaiming an HIV cure, it has the potential to hurt people.
Credit where it's due? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two people and a grad student, eh? So the student doesn't get any credit.
Sad.
Re:Credit where it's due? (Score:4, Informative)
Just to note (Score:5, Interesting)
This appears to insert itself into the HIV sequence, and add a gene that supresses other functions of the same sequence. In my mind this is closer to the treatment available for leprosy than an actual cure.
In other words, if this became successful, people treated with it would most likely be safe from acquiring AIDS from their HIV infection, but would still be HIV positive. They should still not have sex with HIV negative people, to reduce the possiblity of re-infection and/or harm.
It's much better than taking drug coctails to stay alive, though. A hell of a lot cheaper, too.
Computer teaching... (Score:5, Insightful)
Worse than that, computer viruses don't evolve by themselves, but biological ones have that capability. A bad replication or mutation of that virus and we could have a new disease instead a new cure.
In the other hand, some vaccines already uses somewhat disabled diseases to cure them. And worked, and the worst not happened. If we have the opportunity to eliminate a for sure killer disease risking a not so likely future new disease, maybe the risk worths it.
Preferable outcomes? (Score:4, Interesting)
1) The HIV antivirus operates as specified. AIDS is inhibited from occurring, but the HIV virus is still present and may even spread freely now that the risk of AIDS is diminishing.
2) The HIV antivirus is exceptionally lethal. Those that are HIV positive quickly die, but the HIV virus is kept from spreading and may eventually die out.
mutation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now don't get me wrong- I see a lot of good in using more HIV to counter HIV- because of it's mutative abilities; if the 'good HIV' has been reconfigured to somehow prey on 'bad HIV' it will keep mutating in course to follow the 'bad HIV's mutations so that it will survive. However that said, I'm not sure it will allwase work that way, and only time will tell.
Journal of the Plague Years (Score:5, Informative)
AIDS in Africa (Score:5, Insightful)
Scares them because (Score:5, Insightful)
Leor's Scientific Research Paper (Score:5, Informative)
I work in the Arkin group [lbl.gov], and Leor is a friend of mine.
Here is the reference and the PDF of the actual article that the research featured in the Wired report is based off of:
PDF: http://tinyurl.com/yu5ur [tinyurl.com]
Leor S. Weinberger, David V. Schaffer, Adam P. Arkin. "Theoretical Design of a Gene Therapy To Prevent AIDS but Not Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection". 2003. Journal of Virology. 77(18). 10028-10036.
---
~taltman
Model based on another model (Score:4, Informative)
1. Just glancing at the article published under peer review (in Journal of Virology), one assumption that the authors made is that the model of virus dynamics in vivo is correct. Although it is the currently accepted model, it does not mean that it holds true -- I fear that a few more years of data will tell us truly if the mathematical model can be used, especially when pertaining to treatment via "anti-viral viruses."
2. For it to work in vivo, the "anti-virus" has to replicate near those cells/tissues that is actively replicating HIV. In fact, it probably works best if the "anti-virus" can superinfect the same cells infected by HIV -- that's the way anti-sense RNA works, in other words anti-sense RNA needs to anneal with the sense RNA of HIV. The problem is, HIV has mechanisms to reduce superinfection (downregulation of coreceptor comes to mind). The more you have to add to the anti-virus to evade such obstacles, the more difficult you make it -- i.e. the bulkier the virus, viral fitness plummets.
Only empirical studies in vivo will tell us if their treatment will work. As a grad student studying HIV, the news sounds exciting. But just like any "discoveries" made in this field, I have to take it with a grain of salt. Why? Well, think about the history of this epidemic and compare with other epidemics in modern history -- like polio and smallpox. What is taking so long for researchers to develop a vaccine with so much better technology than Jenner, Salk or Sabin ever had in their hands? The answer is in the virus itself, it has become so adept at evading the host immune system and usurping that system for its own end, that it is also destroying our body's chances of ever mounting a good enough response to keep it in check or eradicating it. I wonder if we ever will be able to develop a vaccine, and if we do, what will it take? More research into the biology of the virus? Or more research into our immune systems' biology? I personally think that studies in immunology is the key to answering this.
I read this paper and.... (Score:4, Interesting)
By lowering the number of HIV proteins in solution, you make it more difficult for the HIV to replicate itself wildly and turn into AIDS. The term is 'lowering the setpoint' of HIV becoming AIDS. HIV is still there. It can still turn into AIDS. But the chances of it doing so are less likely, BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE.
In fact, the most interesting part of the paper (to me), was that if the retrovirus vector is too efficient in killing HIV then the therapeutic vector loses its own mechanism of infection (ie. the HIV capsin proteins) because these capsin proteins are no longer being produced.
It's a fantastic idea, but it's not a viable therapy. Yet. Using the same principles, it'll be possible to more directly kill HIV (in the future).
Re:Scares them? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scares them? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not what's been done, it's that it could be done at all, with so much ease and so cheaply.
Now imagine what would happen if someone decides to come up with a virus that is made out of common cold, that does something that it's not supposed to.
How does contracting Hepatitis through common cold sound?
That's exactly the reason they are scared -- if this becomes commonplace, anyone can come up with cheap ways of messing around with genetics.
Now, the article also mentions how the effects are usually not known and sometimes ineffective, so we may not know for quite a while what ELSE this virus does, and what else such cures may do in the future.
It's like making a pact with the enemy's enemy -- sure, you are saved for the day. But what about down the road?
It's just a scary precedent -- I refrain from using the word bad, because we do not yet know what is going to happen. But it's always helpful to think of the worst possible scenarios, too. Especially in sensitive areas like bio-tech.
Re:Scares them? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) They're not grad students. They're both assistant professors at UC Berkeley. (Odd though that they don't refer to them as Doctors.) Do you really think grad students have $200K to throw around on their own experiments?
2) They chose to publicly credit a grad student (Leor Weinberger) with contributing to this particular piece of work. But leave it to Wired's "professional" journalist to write ambiguously on the facts of a story.
3) It is *not* a cure to HIV/AIDS. Its merely a engineered component which would be a necessary step towards a potential cure for HIV using "synthetic" biology. (Apparently, "gene therapy" is an unpopular term nowadays.) Their theory is that a bioengineered HIV virus would be able displace the deadly strains of HIV and thus reduce AIDS deaths. Adam does a lot of computer modelling in his research to help demonstrate his theories (which to me is also a notable aspect of this story...)
So, to conclude this part, you did not RTFA, heavyweights with hundreds of millions of dollars are able to do this, grad students have not yet demonstrated an ability to do this (although much like an a-bomb or bio-weapons, its probably in their reach), all the conclusions you reached from your presumptions are probably incorrect, and most important, there isn't a cure for AIDS just over the horizon.
I really wish they had published papers available online specific to this research. ( Google let me down... :( ) I suspect the Wired writer was incorrect as describing the engineered HIV virus as "latching" onto the real ones. More likely, its engineering the "vaccinating" HIV virus to be non-deadly and outcompete deadly HIV strains to infect a host (but IANAB). Don't suppose any graduate biology/chemistry students could help dig up some links?
What I did find from Google was a useful blurb about Adam and his work [216.239.51.104]
.Re:Tin Foil Hat (Score:5, Funny)
[tin foil hat]While this case may be (almost certainly is) good, I think the day is coming when it will get out of hand and we will see the accidental release of some real nasty man made viral stuff into the environment.[/tin foil hat]
It's not like some kid in Germany released AIDS to help his mom's computer shop and is trying to fix the damage.
Is this a cure? (Score:5, Insightful)
While this is good news for people suffering AIDS. I would not put it in the cure department. The article did not say the anti-HIV virus irradicated HIV, just checked its mutation into AIDS. The results of calling such a treatment a cure would probably be an increased spread of AIDS.
Re:Is this a cure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Difference between HIV and AIDS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is this a cure? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is this a cure? (Score:4, Informative)
That is the current quandry. Anti-retroviral therapy, with its combination of drugs, currently is very effective. Basically the medicine stops the virus from duplicating (the overall viral load will go down), and that lets the bodies infection fighting resources recover (increased T cells). The problem with current treatments is the medications become toxic after long periods of time. Otherwise healthy HIV (+) patients are having liver failure due to the effects of the medications on the liver.
The problem with people who have full blown AIDS is they have lost so much protection, the body becomes very susecptable to all sorts of nasties, sorta like an unpatched Windows box.A nice little primer on HIV can be found at the CDC [nih.gov]
Re:Is this a cure? (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me (geek time) of part of the story line in William Gibson's "Virtual Light" (I think it was this series and not the Neuromancer series).
Basically, everyone was made immunse to the destructive form of the HIV by infecting them with a benign form of HIV that happened to be destructive to other forms of the virus.
Add in all the usual pontifcating about sciene immitating art.
Re:Irresponsible (Score:3, Informative)
I won't admonish you for not reading the article (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the point you are trying to make is that while this engineered virus may inhibit the effects of HIV, it does not destroy the HIV virus. People may become even more complacent about sex than they are now.
Moreover, what happens if either of the viruses mutate? You could potentially lose the protective effects of the engineered virus and find yourself infected with a new strain of HIV.
Re:I won't admonish you for not reading the articl (Score:4, Interesting)
There are really two avenues of research: one to cure HIV, and one to supress it from turning into AIDS. They both have great upsides - curing HIV would be great for obvious reasons (but we haven't been able to do it yet). Supressing HIV reduces the amount of virus in the body - this helps to prevent the onset of AIDS, but it also greatly reduces the risk of transmission of the virus. On successful drug therapy, the number of copies in the bloodstream is very low (under 40 copies/mL blood by today's standards), while untreated it can be in the millions of copies per mL blood. If there isn't as much virus in the blood, the probablity of infection through all avenues (sexually and otherwise) is greatly reduced. Not enough that you'd want to take your chances, but enough to possibly have an impact on the spread of the disease.
Moreover, what happens if either of the viruses mutate? You could potentially lose the protective effects of the engineered virus and find yourself infected with a new strain of HIV.
HIV already constantly mutates - if it didn't, nobody would be dying from AIDS. There are all sorts of permutations of the virus out there - that is the one of the biggest challenges for HIV drugs, and the reason for the cocktail (rather than one drug at a time). HIV is pretty good at becoming resistant to drugs - even if a patient took a drug at precisely the right times all of the time, eventually the virus becomes resistant. Once a mutated copy of the virus is in the blood stream, the drug quickly loses it's effect.
The drug cocktail (usually three drugs) helps to prevent this - if a copy of the virus does manage to mutate around one drug, there are two other ones in the blood to destroy it. As long as the patient is complient with treatment (takes all of the drugs and doesn't miss doses), this line of treatment could theoretically last for years, especially with the number of new drugs in the pipeline. Still, triple-drug therapy isn't perfect, and overtime it seems that resistance will still develop (although it takes much longer than single-drug therapy).
Even if the virus were to mutate, it would do so under the same conditions as the anti-virus... drugs can't mutate, but the anti-virus could, and it could conceivably undergo the same permutations as the real virus - in effect, it could respond to these changes in the virus, which is where drugs will always fall short.
Another point is that it is relatively easy to get the genotype/phenotype of HIV in the blood stream, which allows doctors to determine the best drugs to treat the virus. If they are able to make this anti-virus work, it wouldn't be very difficult to simply create several different 'versions' of the anti-virus that could overcome the various common permutations of the virus.
It's also worth pointing out that while there are a lot of drugs that can treat the virus in the blood stream, not all of them can treat it in other areas (such as the lymph nodes or brain stem). If this anti-virus worked in the same way as HIV does, then it would be able to hit the virus everywhere it reproduces, even the hard-to-reach spots like the lymph nodes.
As for 'it will make people more complacent about sex', well, we'll just have to deal with that one. The same could be said for anti-retroviral drugs. It's not right to abandon this or any avenue of treatment because it may make some people less responsible about their sexual habits, especially with something as devistating as HIV/AIDS.
Of course, it's impossible to have any idea what would actually happen over a long period of time... I'm not a doctor, but even doctors find it difficult to estimate how well and for how long treatments will work - so far, most of what we know is through trial and error.