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."
Oblig Rodney Dangerfield (Score:5, Funny)
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:Oblig Rodney Dangerfield (Score:5, Funny)
...
How old ARE you?
Does your Commadore PET still work?
Re:Oblig Rodney Dangerfield (Score:5, Funny)
What do you think he's using to post you insensitive clod!
On the other hand I've heard similar stories from my Grandfather. Made especially hilarious by the fact that he was already married to my grandmother in the 70's and he says this stuff in front of her.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you sure he's your biological grandfather?
Re:Oblig Rodney Dangerfield (Score:5, Funny)
I was a beta tester for dirt. We never did get all the bugs out...
Re: (Score:2)
I thought Herpes shoved the knife in, and AIDS twisted it for the final kill.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Um. Aids is fatal. Herpes is annoying. For some of us, it's not even that. There's just a *little* difference.
Re:Oblig Rodney Dangerfield (Score:4, Informative)
You weren't around in the early '80s, before AIDS became well known, were you? Herpes was the scourge of the sexual revolution.
Then AIDS came along.
That's why I said, Herpes was the original stab, but AIDS twisted it to kill.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I was around in the 50s, 60s and 70s, but mystically dissapeared from 1981 to 1989. :)
Look, herpes was around, but since I was in the SF bay area at the time, I experienced its arrival as happening at the same time as HIV.
Re: (Score:2)
tell that to the girls in High School who get Genital Herpes on their face and in their throat.
Re:Oblig Rodney Dangerfield (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody seems to give any credence at all to the idea that maybe the puritan values on sex have a parallel to the kosher laws of Judaism and even the deep-seated cross-cultural taboos on things like cannibalism and incest. The rules came about because they provided protection from dangers both immediate and long term.
The cultures who originated these rules may not have understood exactly why doing or not doing certain things prevented illnesses but through generations of trial and error they built up a set of superstitions that provided some meaningful protection. The advantage of the commandment/fiat format is that it is easily absorbed by young and undisciplined minds, so that even if they don't understand why they are doing something they do it anyway because they know that's what they should do.
When you remove this framing and try to treat children (and immature adults) as consistently rational thinking beings you end up with what is effectively a total disregard for important long-standing safety rules.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, this got modded INTERESTING?!?
How old are you people?!?
Re: (Score:2)
Naw, kids these days would be all "wnt2fuk?"
Re: (Score:2)
"Hey everybody! We're all gonna get laid!"
Well, if that all works out, here's the lyrics that we will need: http://lyrics.wikia.com/The_Cramps:Tear_It_Up [wikia.com]
It should be a hoot and a half . . . .
Re: (Score:2)
Does it hurt to be that stupid?
Not ready for humans yet (Score:5, Informative)
This is exciting but it looks like it has a ways to go before it is a viable treatment for humans.
Re: (Score:2)
And when it is, it's only a matter of time until TRIM-resistant HIV develops.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a pretty big leap. It wouldn't be the first time that a disease was eradicated in the wild.
Re: (Score:2)
Will it still work after the virus mutates?
Re: (Score:2)
$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: (Score:2)
Re:$225,000 (Score:4, Informative)
Resolution can be improved by things like deconvolution as used in TFS, but that's still relatively low. You can easily start flirting with 7 digit figures when you use confocal microscopy and variations of laser excitation. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confocal_microscopy
Re:$225,000 (Score:5, Funny)
'The 400x part is usually meaningless. It's just 40x objective and a 10x eye piece.'
Yeah, but our eyepiece goes to 11.
Re: (Score:2)
(is_cheap($225,000) || is_expensive($225,000))
True (yes).
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It's pretty standard for a high-end confocal microscope. Reading the actual paper:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6WXR-50HWJ1Y-1-14&_cdi=7165&_user=334567&_pii=S0042682210003971&_orig=browse&_coverDate=09/15/2010&_sk=995949998&view=c&wchp=dGLbVtz-zSkzk&md5=19c683b5d36819b1870a7b57e48bc6a5&ie=/sdarticle.pdf
there is nothing about a unique microscope setup. University press releases are never a good source of information.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
FYI. The above url is behind a pay wall.
The thing is so expensive, you have to play $31.50 just to get info about it.
Re: (Score:2)
that's like asking is 20K cheap or expensive for a car.
It's expenseive for a 20 year old hond civie, cheap for a 2010 Corvette.
Considering all the money that has gone into finding possible cures, 225,000 is cheap.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the strange part. It's pretty much an average microscope. It really doesn't make any sense why they're mentioning that. Expensive is more than $1 million. Cheap is less than $100 k.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A widefield deconvolution system doesn't really need a laser. Probably a lamp coupled by a liquid light guide is the better option for such a system. The excitation is not monochromatic but the illumination of the field is excellent.
Prices for this class of laboratory equipment are rarely put on paper, because you are expected to haggle. There usually is considerable margin for negotiation. Sometimes you can beat them down by as much as a third of the list price, although 10 to 20% is more common.
Why do you
and the $225,000 figure is relevant? (Score:2, Insightful)
I wish they'd tell us the hair colour of the researchers too since it's probably just as relevant to the article.
Should be: (Score:4, Insightful)
"Using a big-ass microscope, researchers have..."
Re: (Score:2)
Wanna bet they aren't blondes?
Cheap microscope (Score:5, Insightful)
As a biologist, I have no idea why they're making such a big deal of it being a $225,000 deconvolution microscope. It's cheap compared with what most institutions have. Besides which is the fact that the microscope used isn't interesting. Any high(ish) resolution fluorescent microscope would have given you the same data. The interesting part is this TRIM5a. Let's see what happens with recombinant TRIM5a in animal studies.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the idea is to show that some advances are not money dependent. It's interesting to see a development on the enzyme/protein field, it's encouraging and sounds like it's moving in the right direction.
Re: (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 th
Re: (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 act
Re: (Score:2)
Yet pretty dumb. I am no expert but it isn't hard to imagine micro imaging devices costing more than a million.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have no idea why they're making such a big deal of it being a $225,000 deconvolution microscope.
Don't you know? Money cures AIDS! [google.com] If they can get a more expensive microscope, they are sure to cure it once and for all!
Re: (Score:2)
As a lab tech that discovered something, and then attempted to explain it to a reporter; let me help you out there.
Reporters love to report the cool, hip, and neeto aspects of Science far more than they love to get the facts right. If it was a $10 microsocope signed by Ozzy Osbourne, the article would have read "Using a microscope signed by Ozzy Osbourne, ...".
Imagine my shock when I mentioned that one of our tissue sample donors was a marathon runner, and the reporter twisted our kidney malfunction resear
Well yeah (Score:2)
I still have a better idea (Score:2)
A virus is basically a cellular syringe. Break the syringe by destroying the protein shell that contains the RNA - infection stopped as you can't inject into a cell any longer.
Just figure out how to do it without making people lose their hair and fingernails. That's the tough part.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not quite so straightforward. Not all viruses use a cellular-injection technique to achieve infection - in fact the only virus I can thin of which does is tobacco-mosaic (a plant virus).
Viruses use all sorts of nifty tricks to get the host cell to take them up - typically by latching onto normally cellular surface proteins in sequence. The multitude of targets adds redundancy while the similarity to host binding proteins means any attempt to attack the virus nay have serious side effects. In fact this
get ready for the resurgence of other STDs (Score:5, Insightful)
Once HIV is curable, people will find out the hard way that they never did come up with a cure for Herpes.
Re: (Score:2)
Generally, if you're intelligent enough to fear one STD, you're intelligent enough to fear all of them. I find it hard to imagine someone whose promiscuity hinges on the existence of a cure for just one of them.
Re: (Score:2)
Generally, if you're intelligent enough to fear one STD, you're intelligent enough to fear all of them. I find it hard to imagine someone whose promiscuity hinges on the existence of a cure for just one of them.
Well, one kills you and the other doesn't. High-order risk vs low-order risk. Combine that with human nature, and I bet you'll see a massive resurgence in Herpes cases once HIV is cured.
Re:get ready for the resurgence of other STDs (Score:4, Informative)
Why be scared of only one life-threatening illness? Hepatitis still kills you. Syphilis will still kill you, if you don't get the antibiotics. Chlamydia and gonorrhea suck, even if they don't kill you. HPV might kill you, if you're female.
To make things more interesting, consider that people didn't start banging everything in sight once penicillin gave us the ability to cure syphilis.
Your hypothesis would only be true if people had tunnel-vision and were under the impression that HIV is the only high-risk disease that is transmitted sexually. I postulate that those who are scared of the life-threatening consequences of HIV will continue to be scared of the life-threatening consequences from other infections. Those who might have more sex once they knew they are now safe from HIV would probably have the same amount of sex in the absence of any cure for HIV.
The only caveat may be the gay male community. They are somewhat more HIV conscious than your average hetero folks. But most straight folks I know are terrified of all STDs, even the ones that can be cured.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Um. Aids is fatal. Herpes is annoying. There's just a *little* difference. (Sorry this is a repeat comment - Mod me down if you must).
Re: (Score:2)
Hepatitis C is fatal in much the same way as HIV.
Syphilis can be fatal, without antibiotics.
HPV can be fatal, if you develop cervical cancer.
Herpes, while not fatal, is more than "annoying". It's a lifelong infection. Good luck finding potential mates with that.
Chlamydia, scabies, and gonorrhea...okay, they're curable and won't kill you. So I guess I can see where you might refer to them as "annoying".
But I still stand by my point that anyone who is intelligent enough to be scared of HIV is intelligent e
And before the FDA trials are done (Score:2)
HIV mutates fast. For more discussion of HIV (and a lot of rude comments by an HIV researcher [1]) check out Abbie Smith's blog [scienceblogs.com].
[1] Yes, she's young and (very) good looking. And has a dog that you could saddle for rodeo.
Re: (Score:2)
So where are the pitchers? I see the dog's mouth but that's it.
Hot Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm turning 40, though, so they'd better get on with it. If my emails are to be believed, I have only another thirty or forty years until pills no longer facilitate my erections.
Re: (Score:2)
We're one step closer to the day I can go find the freakiest, dirtiest, most disease-laden slut and hire her to do nasty, nasty things... and simply go for a single shot afterwards.
Quagmire? is that you? [entertonement.com] [Sound warning]
So now we just have to worry about... (Score:3, Insightful)
HPV
herpes
Hepatitis C
The last being the worst of them - but if a cure for AIDS is found, i'm sure HVC is right behind it - IIRC, they already use interferon and have a 50/50 success rate to put patients in remission (although the treatment is basically chemotherapy... so makes you feel like poop)
Not profitable (Score:2)
Re:yea. (Score:5, Funny)
"I just saved a bunch of money on child support by switching to condoms!"
Re:yea. (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had a nickel for every condom that broke on me, I could buy myself another pack of Condoms.
Wearing protection, while it helps, is not the best way to go about staying uninfected.
And no I'm not saying that Abstinence is the right choice either, I think I'd probably go insane. But you can, you know, develop relationships with people before sleeping with them, so theres that level of trust where you'll inform each other of any STD's or STI's. THATS the best way to stay clean while being sexually active.
I wear one because I don't want any unwanted pregnancies. Before you jump in with "Isn't she on the pill?" - Yes, she is. Theres 2 reasons for that, one being that there are always those rare cases where the pill isn't 100% effective. The other reason being that it shouldn't be entirely her responsibility. If the odds were one in 1000 while on either the pill or using condoms, both of us doing our part makes it a 1 in a million chance instead.
Re:yea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even forming relationships to trust someone isn't foolproof. They could be an STD carrier and still not tell you. Or they may not even know themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed there is no 100% bullet proof plan - but if you want to be sexually active - do you have a better suggestion?
Re: (Score:2)
I do not. Unfortunately, until there is a vaccine for HIV, it's still a dangerous game depending who you're sleeping with.
It's less of an issue for myself and my wife since we're married, but we do have a female friend who we include from time to time, and we all get tested every 3 months. Trust but verify.
Re: (Score:2)
Blowing yourself up and getting a whole passel of virgins? Just a thought.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:yea. (Score:4, Informative)
And yet, no insurer offers contraceptive-failure insurance (presumably for those who have been surgically sterilized: 1/600-1/2000 failure rate for men, and 1/300 for women), nor is a contract to abort in the event of contraceptive failure legally enforceable.
Further, a man can be assessed child support for a child provably not his, and jailed if he does not pay. (Google "legal father" sometime, and the lack of proper service of process to allow disputing paternity within statutory limits). I suppose this is unconstitutional, but mounting a constitutional challenge is likely beyond the financial means of many caught in this trap.
Finally, there is the case [thefreelibrary.com] of a minor in Florida, seduced by an adult woman, who subsequently became pregnant. Florida law forbids a minor being ordered to pay child support to an adult, but as soon as he turned 18, he was hit with a a $50,000 arrears tab, and ordered to pay or go to jail.
Abstinence, and the general avoiding of women of unknown character, is the only defense a man has if he does not want to father a child or be required to financially support one.
Re: (Score:2)
Further, a man can be assessed child support for a child provably not his, and jailed if he does not pay. (Google "legal father" sometime, and the lack of proper service of process to allow disputing paternity within statutory limits). I suppose this is unconstitutional, but mounting a constitutional challenge is likely beyond the financial means of many caught in this trap.
And if he did have enough money to fight it, it would probably just be cheaper and easier for him to pay it anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not really, because "child support" includes statutory support requirements based on "earning ability" AS WELL AS discretionary expenses for the child's "special" needs, often determined by a "best interests" standard applied by the court to include state-provided psychologists, psychiatrists, and any number of professionals you now have to pay. In other words, the "child support" ordered can be unbounded, and exceed any ability you have to pay, resulting in your incarceration for not paying it.
So, if you c
Re: (Score:2)
In other words, caring for someone, no matter how briefly, has its consequences. Nothing new there.
Re:yea. (Score:4, Informative)
In other words, caring for someone, no matter how briefly, has its consequences. Nothing new there.
No, the specific instances are a woman gets pregnant, has a child, and seeks welfare. She names a man who has never met the child or supported the woman or ever had sex with her as the father, as required by many states to get welfare, so the state can go after the father for child support to reimburse the welfare provided. She provides an address for this man. A letter is sent there giving him a limited time to disprove paternity. Problem is, it's not his address. The usual service of process is not followed, and he is clueless as to the claim until the statute of limitations expires to contest it. He finds out when his wages start to be garnished by the state. Then, it is too late.
Google "paternity fraid".
In one instance, a man was ordered to pay child support for a child that didn't even exist.
Re:yea. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem stems from welfare being a federal program administered by the states. To continue to provide welfare funds to a state, the state must identify a certain percentage of absent fathers. This is so that welfare can be recovered from child support obligations. So, state legislation is passed defining the notion of a "legal father".
The usual assumption is that this is either a biological father, a legally adopting father, or a man that has publicly acted as a father figure to the child. But, the truth is more sinister: to catch the requisite number of "fathers", the laws are very lax on the process of service requirements: often the mother just has to provide an address, and paperwork is sent there. The man is usually clueless as to the claim, and his (statutorily short) window of opportunity to dispute it until it is too late. He finds out only when his wages are garnished.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
....The other reason being that it shouldn't be entirely her responsibility.
That's why I'm a gentleman and pull out.
Re: (Score:2)
*If I had a nickel for every condom that broke on me, I could buy myself another pack of Condoms.*
What is really frightening is that dollar stores are selling them where I live, and you can even buy them from Dealextreme.
I wouldn't trust my junk with a condom from a dollar store or from Dealextreme (or any internet store), but If they are selling them, it means people are buying and *USING* them.
Re:yea. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
1) The soldiers in the wooden horse were Greeks, not Trojans.
2) Woooooooooooooooooosh!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
ProTip:
Er, oh behalf of which profession are you speaking?
Re: (Score:2)
And you don't understand math.
Break it down for me then. You see I was always under the impression that 1/1000 times 1/1000 equals 1/1000000 .
But clearly my understanding is wrong. Please, please explain.
Re: (Score:2)
No one believes it, and you're not making us think you have a big dick.
Also - not what I claimed. I claimed condoms break easily, and to be honest it doesn't really have much to do with the size - it's more about adequate lubrication for the full duration.
Re: (Score:2)
No one believes it, and you're not making us think you have a big dick.
Also - not what I claimed. I claimed condoms break easily, and to be honest it doesn't really have much to do with the size - it's more about adequate lubrication for the full duration.
Oh so now you're not claiming you have a big dick but that you last forever. Your girlfriend must be impressed ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Or she's really dry!
I can dance around the issue all day. lol.
Re:yea. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So which drug company is going to buy the (Score:4, Informative)
Even if you can kill the HIV virus, you still wouldn't have a cure.
HIV is a retrovirus. It becomes part of the infected cell's genome. Any agent that kills the virus can suppress symptoms/disease but not cure people who are already infected.
P.S. Please take off your tin-foil hat. The glare is quite annoying.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The RNA from HIV is retro-transcribed into DNA which is integrated into the host cell genome. It can become latent where it does not actively replicate virus. That's why HIV patients can live so long. Something then later triggers the lytic phase where the viral replication resumes, eventually leading to AIDS.
An agent that kills HIV will remove HIV from your system, but the latent virus DNA inside cells remain undetected and cannot be removed.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but doesn't that mean that the virus won't infect any more cells, as any cells that begin replicating the virus would only produce more virus that would then be killed in the host system on release?
Essentially, cells infected are "lost" or considered lost, but the original production of uninfected white blood cells continues? Or does the HIV virus infect the originating factories?
I admit, my knowledge of biology is rather armchair-level.
Re: (Score:2)
(No worries about knowledge level. We're all here to learn, and I'm probably wrong about somethings.)
So, HIV goes latent, so there is effectively no virus. There is nothing for the drug to kill. When HIV goes back into the lytic cycle, you have to have the drug there to kill the virus, but you don't know when HIV goes back to lytic; it can be 2 weeks or 2 decades. You would have to keep the patient on the drug during this whole time or at least keep monitoring the patient and giving them the drug whenever i
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the virus has to be in the person's system in some form for it to be spread from one person to another, though... so it doesn't go completely dormant, does it?
I was thinking this was more along the lines of a permanent medication/supplement that the person takes daily (hourly) to kill any free-floating (non-encoded, pre-payload delivery through the cell membrane) virus in the system so it can no longer be spread and the infection wouldn't get worse (eventually be killed off as cells are activated and
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.
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't happen. If you know the pharmaceutical business, you would understand why that's the least profitable thing they could do, and why it couldn't be done anyways.
Re: (Score:2)
I want to nip this in the bud:
It doesn't happen. Learn how the sciences in pharmaceutical companies is done, look at the patent regulation regarding pharmaceutical , and look at the bonus structure for the executives.
Now think about the market.
The first two on my list are far to complex for a /. post, so I will address the money portion.
ABC company figures out a cure for AIDS.
The CEO and board can sit on it and make a few % increase in profit. Then it falls out of patent and someone else rakes it in. Of the
Re: (Score:2)
Plus, What company in their right mind would give up being able to use the marketing campain "Brought to you by the people that _friggen cured AIDS_". The idea that pharmaceutical companies are holding back cures for things is patently ridiculous.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. The lack of any sense of humor among slashdotters is truly astounding.
Re: (Score:2)
Funny that you interpreted it like this. I had to read your post twice and think what made you mention homosexuality with relation to the GP.
When I read "the protein is straight" I thought the joke was that it isn't folded, so all the effort spent in studying protein folding was in vain.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, and picking on the gay community exclusively when IV drug users were another good vector...
At the start of 'epidemic', being a straight non-drug user (and ideally male) made it very unlikely you'd ever be near the virus, never mind be infected by it.
And it was political correctness that prevented us from quarantining the sick. You see, it's not a 'gay' disease, but if you're putting AIDS patients into quarantine you're trying to lock the gays away. Holy cognitive dissonance.
I consider the spread of
Re:So the FDA can sit on it (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right: We should burn down the FDA so that the wise and beneficient pharmaceutical companies can immediately cure all our diseases with their well-tested, totally safe, and 100% effective drugs that are never mis-marketed for the sake of profit.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So the FDA can sit on it (Score:5, Funny)
You read a LOT of Ayn Rand when you were a young, lonely and impressionable teenager, didn't you?