New Drug Could Cure Nearly Any Viral Infection 414
HardYakka writes "A team of researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory have designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection. The researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever."
It's called Kalocin. (Score:5, Funny)
1969 called. They want their drug [wikipedia.org] back.
Re:It's called Kalocin. (Score:4, Interesting)
That would actually be my worry. Enough people already take drugs when they have the slight discomfort or to cure their flu (despite anti-bacterials having no effect on the flu). What's going to happen when they can take a drug for all that stuff? At the rate we use drugs, it seems like this one would be burned out and ineffective pretty fast unless the government really restricts it (more the Cipro or other other drugs that are left).
The idea of bugs that become resistant to all this stuff, or a drug that people can't stop taking because of horrible side effects... that sounds like great news. Can we please be careful not to invent/breed ourselves into a pseduo-Descolada [wikipedia.org]?
Re:It's called Kalocin. (Score:4, Insightful)
the thing is that looking into the way that it works: it's hard to see any straightforward way for most of these viruses to evolve a resistance.
It targets dsRNA which is very central to their life cycle.
it's the difference between an animal evolving a resistance to a poison and evolving a resistance to having it's internal organs ripped out.
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Read up on Penicillin [wikipedia.org] for comparison. It was considered a "wonder drug" for the time because it had the same idea, attack a critical mechanism used only by bacteria:
Then penicillin went into massive-scale us
Re:It's called Kalocin. (Score:4, Interesting)
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You're arguing from analogy without really understanding your analogy.
Penicillin interferes with the way many bacteria build cell walls, but there are lots that are naturally resistant to penicillin because they build their cell walls differently. Bacteria also love to swap genes, so eventually that minor cell wall modification got spread around. The fact that penicillin was considered a wonder drug had more to do with it being the first antibiotic discovered. And there wasn't really an "idea" with using
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Well played, good sir. I missed that completely and posted a stupid naive response, accompanied by a loud woosh sound as it went over my head...
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Re:It's called Kalocin. (Score:5, Insightful)
How useful is Penicillin these days?
still fairly useful.Not as useful as it used to be but still good.
How much worse is MRSA compared to the weaker infections that people used to get?
no worse. it's just that we've become so accustomed to antibiotics working insanely well that when a handful of bugs become resistant they seem far scarier than their ancestors despite being no more deadly.
It's hard to comprehend how deadly bacterial infections were before Penicillin. Getting just a taste of it in the form of MRSA only seems scarier relative to how thing have been since penicillin.
Re:It's called Kalocin. (Score:5, Insightful)
The stupidity of it all is that MRSA is not necessary and can be prevented.
While I agree with you that overuse of antibiotics for trivial purposes has sped up the development of resistant strains, I think you're overstating it. The tone of your post suggests you blame MRSA entirely on factory farming and physician incompetence/laziness, which simply isn't the case.
To begin with, there are two more or less unavoidable problems that lead to the development of resistant strains. The first is that people prescribed antibiotics for actual bacterial infections often stop taking them when the symptoms abate, rather than taking the full course. The second is that hospitals are breeding grounds for resistant infections. Even a well managed hospital isn't completely safe.
Now, you can reduce those problems with public education and changes to hospital policies, but you can't eliminate the threat, which brings us to the larger issue; resistant strains are inevitable. In a perfect world, where no antibiotics were misused and all hospitals were entirely sterile, there would still arise antibiotic resistant bacteria over time. Basic evolution in action.
So no, MRSA and it's kin cannot be prevented, they can merely be reduced in prevalence.
Now, obviously new treatments can be devised to try and shift our antibacterial measures as the bacteria adapt; in particular if we retire treatments that have become ineffective, the strains resistant to those drugs might die out from competition, allowing us to revive "useless" antibiotics decades or more in the future.
Doing what you suggest - essentially banning antibiotic misuse - is still a good idea, but without the other solutions mentioned above, it's just a delaying tactic.
We do that here in the US (Score:3)
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That doesn't mean that there can't be bad reprocussions to over-use of a real drug that can cure a large number of illnesses, assuming the drug works out in trials. How useful is Penicillin these days?
I seem to recall hearing that part of the problem of antibiotic resistance was when antibiotics aren't used to completion. Treating until the symptoms were largely gone, but not all the infectious agent would give that remainder a good shot at developing resistance genes and proliferating, instead of being killed off completely.
Also we hopefully won't be as cavalier about deploying these antivirals as we were when antibiotics were first discovered and we hadn't already encountered resistance. We probab
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aak, sorry -- wrong parent. (Score:2)
Mea culpa.
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Just come up with a cure for AIDS...so we can all get laid again without worrying or feeling guilty about screwing without a fuckin' rubber.....
Geez, the day they cure AIDS, I'm predicting the divorce rate will skyrocket with a ton of guys going "Later Bitch"....and not having to worry about dying if they get laid by someone different.
Oh well....sure would be nice to go back to the days before AID's..when you really didn't worry as long as she was on the pill, and anything you c
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Wow, did this post ever reveal a lot about you.
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You say that like it is a bad thing?
Just saying...feel sorry for the kids today..back in my day, you could fuck anything that moves, and the worst thing you worried about was getting her pregnant....but most of them were on the pill, so that wasn't as big a worry. And if you caught the clap or something, all you needed was a shot. You also didn't feel forced to be so monogamous for health reasons.
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You must have missed the part where she was on the pill.
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I don't know where and when the "it feels good, so it must be bad" meme entered the Western hive mind. Have we come to a point where a harmless, but very satisfying activity is frowned upon because of it's harmlessness? Have we come to a point, where every action, every pleasure, every thought must have some rational meaning or be an indispensable element of some great planet-saving master plan?
There's almost no product, no advertisement, no activity, no pleasure, no part of life that is not overloaded with
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IMO it is because the mindset that puts such high value on instant gratification of any sort is not the type to instill other societal virtues as, patience, self-control, and charity. It is just about me, right now.
Even today you can look at communities where promiscuity is the norm and see the contrast in quality of life compared to a "regular" community.
HIV? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any news on HIV / AIDS? Strange that that isn't the first virus threw into the petri dish with this stuff, to be honest.
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If it only works on the 15 drugs it would be a major break through... what is seem like it can do, it's a fucking game changer.
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I'm not an immunologist/molecular biologist, but if this drug works by targeting the infected cells to eliminate the infection, then by the time an HIV-infection is apparent, you might as well target the whole human, and there are already several drugs that do that very effectively. Potassium Cyanide comes to mind, for one...
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You're right, you're not an immunologist.
There's a rather big difference between T-cells, which is what HIV infects, and "the whole human."
Re:HIV? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a rather big difference between T-cells, which is what HIV infects, and "the whole human."
I agree; at most you'd likely have to stick the person into an isolation area as the die-off of T-Cells blows an HIV infection into an advanced case of AIDS in a matter of hours. Of course, once HIV is purged T-Cells would quickly return to normal levels, probably a couple weeks.
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You're thinking like a scientist. Think like a business man. You cure the common cold first. That gets you 9 million units of fame, some nice early revenues from cold cures, and a ginormous grant to test if it can cure HIV as well.
Well, in reality, HIV is a single-stranded retrovirus, and not a double-stranded virus. Although, if this works, it will mitigate some of the negative effect
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I release it as a cure all, watch my stock quadruples, get a billion dollar bonus and then move on to me pet projects.
Or, you know release it slowly so the people that come after me can make the serious money.
Re:HIV? (Score:5, Informative)
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However, it would appear that once the HIV RNA has been reverse-transcribed to cDNA and integrated into the genome, then the approach presented in this paper would not work--i.e. if you have AIDS, this won't help you.
Won't CURE you, because it won't clean out the dormant virus. But if you're taking it when the virus activates it will kill off the affected cells. So taking it in an ongoing fashion should stop the effects of AIDS and gradually reduce the population of dormant infected cells as they become a
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HIV is a retrovirus, a kind of virus that a broad-spectrum "cure all" treatment would be least likely to affect. Sure it'd be worth trying at some point, but it really wouldn't be at the top of the list based on having any expectation of success.
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That's stupid. A percentage of the population is naturally immune to HIV. A vaccine is a matter of genetic engineering, that's all.
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I think it's less likely we'll come up with across the board, cancer-free genetic engineering on people who are past conception, than it is we'll come up with a treatment for HIV once you get it.
As an aside, I don't think genetic engineering immunity to HIV would be correctly called a "vaccine." If you're not training the immune system to recognize the infection and fight it itself, that's not a vaccine (though I
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We... already have a treatment for HIV after you get it. The cocktails are now such that HIV has very little effect on life expectancy.
Even if money were no object (with socialized medicine it still comes from somewhere), There is a big difference between "take this drug forever" and take it for a short period of time. If you have aids, you can't go living someplace where you can't get your medicine, so that makes climbing a mountain, or living in space or a submarine harder. Most people don't want to go to that extreme, but how about disappearing for a few days?
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A vaccine is a matter of genetic engineering, that's all.
You don't even need advanced direct genetic engineering; You could probably almost completely spread immunity in ~10 generations using traditional(if draconian) breeding techniques.
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Not all of your cells would be infected. By that point you're already on your death bed...
Re:HIV? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you take the person into a clean room, administer the drug, wait a few weeks for their immune system to grow back (possibly from transplant or stem cell therapy), and they walk out cured. Not a bad deal.
Re:HIV? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you take the person into a clean room, administer the drug, wait a few weeks for their immune system to grow back (possibly from transplant or stem cell therapy), and they walk out cured. Not a bad deal.
Yes it would have to be a transplant or stem cell therapy since HIV infects the bone marrow which produces blood and immune cells, and so would necessarily have to be killed.
There are many possible problems and complications from a bone marrow transplant. Stem cell therapy would get rid of the greatest one, the rejection of non-closely matched marrow, but many would remain. Without that therapy, it would be very dangerous to use this route in the majority of cases where close matches can't be found. Leukemia patients won't undergo a transplant in the absence of a close match until the leukemia is about to go into the acute phase and kill them.
A bone marrow transplant has already been used to cure AIDS. But it is not clear that this is the best choice if you have access to modern AIDS drugs.
Re:HIV? (Score:4, Insightful)
It wouldn't necessarily have to be either one, if the drug is targeted enough and the body can recover. Assuming the drug only kills infected cells, and has a 100% kill rate, it's likely it would leave some cells intact that hadn't been infected. Not enough to support normal immune response on their own, but perhaps enough to regrow the rest naturally.
This of course is wild speculation; we wouldn't know until we try. The main point is still that if you can kill (just) the infected cells fairly easily, you are well on your way to designing a treatment. It may not be simple, and it may not be cheap, but you should have options.
Re:HIV? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bone marrow constantly builds new immune cells. Patients kept in total quarantine will survive when no other diseases can reach them until their immune system is built up again. Problem solved.
Procedure is used for a Leukemia and other diseases, so there exists medical experience on it.
Re:HIV? (Score:4, Informative)
TFA: "We have demonstrated that DRACOs are effective against viruses with DNA, dsRNA, positive-sense ssRNA, and negative-sense ssRNA genomes; enveloped and non-enveloped viruses; viruses that replicate in the cytoplasm and viruses that replicate in the nucleus; human, bat, and rodent viruses; and viruses that use a variety of cellular receptors"
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Biosafety clearance is a complicated subject and ease of transmission can have as much to do with a high level as virulence. I just looked it up and both HIV and influenza are both BSL 2 (fairly low, but not trivially so)
Moderators: Please mod down. (Score:5, Informative)
What's a virus? (Score:5, Interesting)
So does a false positive mean you're dead?
Drug: Must find viruses. Oh, there's one...I think. And that one too. Oooh, actually, they're ALL viruses!
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No, we call it a virus if it injects code into a cell that didn't have that code before. Viruses don't have to make us sick - just be a bit of genetic code that inserts itself into ours. Hence why computer viruses are so named –they're bits of code that inject themselves into the processes of a system.
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Our cells carry loads of genetic material picked up pretty much everywhere. They just go "hey look, some code, I wonder what will happen if I execute it".
There are now at least two valid interpretations of "Humans are DNA based windows users"
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Our cells carry loads of genetic material picked up pretty much everywhere.
They're called Endogenous Retroviruses [scienceblogs.com].
Abbie is never gonna forgive me.
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No, your cells don't just pick up any old bit of RNA/DNA and run it. A virus infecting a cell is an invasive thing, that cells are designed to protect against, and generally makes the cell pretty useless afterwards, as far as you're concerned. Occasionally, some viral DNA might get inserted into a cell and the cell will keep functioning. If it's a germ line cell, that viral DNA gets passed on. But that doesn't happen very often.
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Michel Colman? Do I know you from somewhere [gene.com]?
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From the abstract:
We have developed a new broad-spectrum antiviral approach, dubbed Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) that selectively induces apoptosis in cells containing viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells.
I don't believe the biology of the human species utilizes Double-stranded RNA under any circumstances. Consequently, although it might be present in some of our genetic code, no healthy human cells should ever *express* dsRNA unless the cellular machinery has been hijacked by viral code. They did say testing it on 11 kinds of healthy mammalian cells produced no ill effects, but I guess that is by no means an exhaustive representation of a complete human being.
However, one wonders if unle
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Re:What's a virus? (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, lets assume Alzheimer's is caused (as suspected) by a combination of a defective APoE gene and an HSV1 infection. So if the vast majority of brain cells are infected but the brain is (more or less) still highly functional... wouldn't this theoretically kill every one of those brain cells, essentially advancing alzheimer's itself many-fold in a matter of weeks?
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It sounds like it only kills cells where the virus is actually replicating
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Not sufficent (Score:2, Insightful)
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Don't worry. DRACO is patented until 2029.
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Bullshit.. as has been seen time and time again.
The self interest of a CEO to personally gain billions outweighs their desire to see their competitors make money.
Of course, a person with the brains like yours is bound to jump to the first knee jerk reaction and not think or actually study the industry they are talking about.
The important question is: (Score:3)
What exactly does this do to the host organism (us) that is carrying these infected (and sub sequentially killed off) cells?
Since I don't speak micro-biologist, I'm not sure that was even addressed or answered in the article.
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You'll get really sick as all the dead cells and/or pathogens release toxic nastiness all at once, and provided you survive that you'll get better.
I forget what this is called, but it's actually a problem when killing off a large infection with antibiotics or such.
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I believe you are referring to a Herxheimer reaction [wikipedia.org].
However, it is usually only associated with the death of bacteria and not virus infected cells.
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I think 'endotoxic shock' was the term used in the past for that.
It's been 20+ years since I learned this in school, so the name may have changed.
Side effects (Score:2)
Todd Rider (Score:4, Interesting)
Also the man who has so far explained why inertial-confinement fusion can't work [fusor.net]. Maybe.
I knew he was involved in medical research, but this is pretty awesome.
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The combination of the two fields triggers my "possible crackpot" alert. Plus the fact that googling for "Todd Rider" returns Wikipedia and pop-sci articles, but no "real" scientific publications. Can anyone in the field comment on the credibility/reputation of Dr. Rider? I don't intend to be offensive, maybe he's really a top guy in the field, it's just that both claims are quite bold and I'd be happy to get some external confirmation.
Yeah, I've just skimmed it. It's plausible. There are two problems - the first is getting it into the cells. The system they used:
For delivery into cells in vitro or in vivo, DRACOs can be fused with proven protein transduction tags, including a sequence from the HIV TAT protein [28], the related protein transduction domain 4 (PTD) [29], and polyarginine
really isn't a good drug delivery system. That's the problem with a number of targeted therapies - you have to get to the target in large enough numbers to be useful medically and with an easy enough system to be useful clinically.
Secondly, what they do is to bind large double stranded RNA molecules (which, according TFA exist primarily in RNA viruses, NOT in mammalian cells)
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Use Google Scholar [google.com.au] instead of plain Google. He looks to have plenty of real science to his credit. (Although I'm betting those 1930s papers were someone else...)
Time (Score:2)
Tested on 15 Viruses ... (Score:2, Insightful)
While there are a few 10k virus forms known and the total number of "variations" goes into the dozens of millions?
Sounds like a plan for disaster and not like a cure.
Side effects ? (Score:2)
Given that some 8% of the human genome is from retroviruses [wikipedia.org], some of which may be expressed in some way, perhaps not all the time, -- with good or bad consequences, what side effects may we expect if this 8% causes some cells to be identified as infected? Could it result in huge cell death ?
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Read the article. The RNA the drug targets is only found in virus infected cells. Either the viral components of our DNA are not expressed or do not cause the cell to produce the right RNA. They tested their drug against non-infected human cells as well as mice, which have similar viral sequences in their DNA.
"Type of RNA only produced by infected cells" (Score:2)
If there were even a tiny fraction of exceptions, things would get very ugly...
Abstract from PLoS One (Score:3)
Here's the abstract of the paper. Note that the summary forgot to mention that the drug has been tested in normal cell lines as well. Also not mentioned is that all of this testing in live animals (not the cell lines) has been in mice and lots and lots of things go wrong when taking a drug developed in a mouse model to humans. It helps a lot that some of the normal cell lines shown to be unaffected were human.
Currently there are relatively few antiviral therapeutics, and most which do exist are highly pathogen-specific or have other disadvantages. We have developed a new broad-spectrum antiviral approach, dubbed Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) that selectively induces apoptosis in cells containing viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells. We have created DRACOs and shown that they are nontoxic in 11 mammalian cell types and effective against 15 different viruses, including dengue flavivirus, Amapari and Tacaribe arenaviruses, Guama bunyavirus, and H1N1 influenza. We have also demonstrated that DRACOs can rescue mice challenged with H1N1 influenza. DRACOs have the potential to be effective therapeutics or prophylactics for numerous clinical and priority viruses, due to the broad-spectrum sensitivity of the dsRNA detection domain, the potent activity of the apoptosis induction domain, and the novel direct linkage between the two which viruses have never encountered.
As some posters suggested, there might be problems with herpes-style infections where the virus has infected nerve cells and gone dormant. The authors did not mention this in the paper as far as I could tell.
I thought humans were mostly virus, countwise (Score:2)
The question is how does medicine distinguish the between the useful viruses and bad viruses?
But where does that leave our immune systems? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.
A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.
This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.
So to put it bluntly, in a world where everybody pops a few anti-flu pills every time they get a little sniffle, what does the human immune system do all day? I can see two possible outcomes:
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I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.
A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.
This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.
>
It's been noted by other posters, but this treatment is just amping up what the cell would normally do if it detected a viral infection, that is, kill itself to save the host. It turns out most successful viruses have evolved a way to shut off this response, and this treatment is like adding a redundant way to activate it. That's not to say it couldn't backfire, most of these self-destruct pathways need to be activated by multiple inputs to avoid accidental triggering (just like needing two special keys t
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It's possible, going by the mechanism being used, that it turns every viral infection you get while on it into the equivalent of a (possibly weak) deactivated virus vaccine. In fact, if it didn't, it probably wouldn't work at all, as it's unlikely it can kill all the infected cells before they have done any viral replication work.
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So there would be 'free floating' and live viruses that your immune system would deal with.
Not really. A virus enters a cell, uses cell material to replicate, then the replicated viruses leave the cell in search of new cells to infect. Kill the cell, kill the virus, no replication, no more free-floating virus. This treatment could work very, very quickly.
AFAIK the only way the body can cure a virus once it goes totally rampant inside of your cells is to overheat to the point that it doesn't kill you but it kills the virus (Fever)
Nobody really knows the reason for fever. It might have that effect, but it's unlikely, because (for example) you need to heat water all the way to boiling for it to be effective in sterilizing medical equipment. The increased heat may increase t
Published in PLoS One??? (Score:3)
Big deal... (Score:3)
I have learned to ignore anything about new medical discoveries until the drug in question is available from my local doctor, hospital or chemist.
Just because "drug x" does good things in rats or labs or even monkey/human trials doesn't mean its going to be available for normal people any time soon, if ever (think about all the instances where a promising drug came about and then never made it to market because of side effects)
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The only nasty side effect that might take place is a huge leap in the evolution of viruses. The stuff that does survive will be some extremely nasty sci-fi shit, including, I wouldn't be surprised, viruses that "hold the body hostage" by infecting critical cells and the biological equivalent of polymorphic viruses.
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Both of those already exist. HIV in particular does both.
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Both of those already exist. HIV in particular does both.
Yes that's exactly the point. Just like its no problem for healthy normal humans if 0.001% of staph bacteria are antibiotic resistant... The problem is when you kill ALL the other staph bacteria so the population becomes 100% antibiotic resistant. Then you got a big problem, especially if that resistance cross pollinates into other bacteria.
So if you wipe almost all viruses off the face of the earth except HIV, then pretty much all viruses, are going to take on the characteristics of HIV. Including the c
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Re: Wow, just wow. (Score:4, Informative)
If Slashdot impresses you, try EurekAlert [eurekalert.org].
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thank you, I love slahdot for comment likes yours
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So you like having your expectations jacked way up, and then replaced with utter disappointment?
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Buzzkill: no, it would just kill your ass or turn you into a vegetable
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Just sayin...it thinks all your braincells are viruses and turns you into a ZOMBIE.
Naah your blood/brain barrier is remarkably efficient. Thats the good news. The bad news is this probably won't cure viral meningitis unless you inject it directly into the spinal fluid.
The really bad situation is this kills virus infected cells. Well.. research some autoimmune based digestive system diseases: the simplified version is your digestive system eats a protein (gluten, soy, etc) that your immune system dislikes, so your immune system exerts great effort on destroying your digestive system. L
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Re:We are doomed then (Score:4, Informative)
The mechanics of how the drug works should actually make simple virus mutations incredibly unlikely to result in resistance.
The drug is a protien that is triggered by the virus's production of double stranded DNA. Double Stranded DNA is actually how your immune system already recognizes a viral infection, when it's detected it sets of a cascade of events that should ultimately end in the cells elimination. The way most viruses beat the immune system response is by blocking or attacking one or more of the cascaded steps before cell death. This protein shortcuts all of those steps and makes the jump straight from detection of double stranded DNA to triggered cell suicide, there was a fancy word for it that I can't remember.
In short the only mutation that would result in resistance/immunity would be for the virus to no longer cause double stranded DNA to be created. Which is a mutation that likely would have happened already if it's possible, as it would completely avoid the immune systems response.
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Actually from looking at how it works it'd probably be damned hard to evolve a resistance to it since it targets something extremely central to the virus life cycle so that may take quite a while.
Far harder than antibiotic resistance for bacteria