Will The Future Of America's Biodefense Stockpile Include DNA-Based Vaccines? (thebulletin.org) 29
Dan Drollette calls our attention to America's Strategic National Stockpile for Biodefense, "a little-publicized $7 billion federal agency...key to defending the country from a biological attack."
"Its operators have to prepare for the unthinkable, such as what to do if 100,000 cases of some new disease with pandemic potential appears -- what global health officials have sometimes dubbed 'Disease X.'"
From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: [O]ne of the most surprising features about the stockpile is that in all likelihood, it is probably incomplete. The reason for this is that although the stockpile includes what are presumed to be the best medical countermeasures for a broad range of potential biothreats -- we don't know the exact inventory because the identity of the contents are closely held -- there is an even broader range of potential biothreat agents that an adversary could use in an attack. And stockpiling countermeasures for every conceivable individual agent is currently not feasible because countermeasures for some biothreat agents do not even exist yet -- and even if they did, the continuous maintenance of copious countermeasures may not be logistically or financially feasible. There is also the possibility that an adversary could select or engineer an agent that is simply resistant to all-known medications.
To address this problem, future stockpiles may benefit from an emerging approach to disease treatment: shifting countermeasures from today's emphasis on protein-based vaccines and antitoxins to a new system primarily focused on nucleic acid (DNA and RNA) coding for genes that help the body protect itself from myriad infectious diseases and toxins. This approach offers the long-term prospect of a stockpile that could simultaneously be more comprehensive and vastly cheaper to establish and maintain. Such a future is conceivable because of the accelerated pace of molecular biology research and development of methods to safely transfer (or what specialists refer to as "deliver") synthetic genes into people.
DNA vaccines, for example, are based on the delivery of synthetic genes that code for individual proteins found on a bacteria or a virus -- instead of using the whole pathogen itself as a basis for the vaccine... Once the immune system has established a long-term memory of these recognizable markers, the next time the same pathogen protein appears (now in the context of an infection), the body can immediately identify it as foreign and begin producing large quantities of protective antibodies to fight it. More tantalizing for a future Strategic National Stockpile than improved vaccines -- which would still have a lag time of one-to-two weeks until protection -- is the possibility of bypassing the requirement for immune "education" entirely, and directly delivering genes that code for pathogen-specific antibodies, thereby achieving more rapid protection. The process involves determining the genetic sequence for an antibody that is known to offer protection against a pathogen and then delivering that gene to cells. The body's own cells re-use their existing protein production machinery and become antibody factories, a method termed "antibody gene transfer." It is a form of immunotherapy that has been garnering significant attention lately as a new approach for treating some chronic diseases, such as cancer.
"Its operators have to prepare for the unthinkable, such as what to do if 100,000 cases of some new disease with pandemic potential appears -- what global health officials have sometimes dubbed 'Disease X.'"
From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: [O]ne of the most surprising features about the stockpile is that in all likelihood, it is probably incomplete. The reason for this is that although the stockpile includes what are presumed to be the best medical countermeasures for a broad range of potential biothreats -- we don't know the exact inventory because the identity of the contents are closely held -- there is an even broader range of potential biothreat agents that an adversary could use in an attack. And stockpiling countermeasures for every conceivable individual agent is currently not feasible because countermeasures for some biothreat agents do not even exist yet -- and even if they did, the continuous maintenance of copious countermeasures may not be logistically or financially feasible. There is also the possibility that an adversary could select or engineer an agent that is simply resistant to all-known medications.
To address this problem, future stockpiles may benefit from an emerging approach to disease treatment: shifting countermeasures from today's emphasis on protein-based vaccines and antitoxins to a new system primarily focused on nucleic acid (DNA and RNA) coding for genes that help the body protect itself from myriad infectious diseases and toxins. This approach offers the long-term prospect of a stockpile that could simultaneously be more comprehensive and vastly cheaper to establish and maintain. Such a future is conceivable because of the accelerated pace of molecular biology research and development of methods to safely transfer (or what specialists refer to as "deliver") synthetic genes into people.
DNA vaccines, for example, are based on the delivery of synthetic genes that code for individual proteins found on a bacteria or a virus -- instead of using the whole pathogen itself as a basis for the vaccine... Once the immune system has established a long-term memory of these recognizable markers, the next time the same pathogen protein appears (now in the context of an infection), the body can immediately identify it as foreign and begin producing large quantities of protective antibodies to fight it. More tantalizing for a future Strategic National Stockpile than improved vaccines -- which would still have a lag time of one-to-two weeks until protection -- is the possibility of bypassing the requirement for immune "education" entirely, and directly delivering genes that code for pathogen-specific antibodies, thereby achieving more rapid protection. The process involves determining the genetic sequence for an antibody that is known to offer protection against a pathogen and then delivering that gene to cells. The body's own cells re-use their existing protein production machinery and become antibody factories, a method termed "antibody gene transfer." It is a form of immunotherapy that has been garnering significant attention lately as a new approach for treating some chronic diseases, such as cancer.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope you are just reading things wrong and aren't so inept at reading (or good at trolling) that you believe something is added to street heroin to kill police officers.
The side product in street heroin, that is so toxic to the police, is fentanyl and it's analogues like remifentanil. Fentanyl is a powerful narcotic, remi is about twice as powerful; both are different from more common medicinal analgesic narcotics in that they are absorbable through the skin. In fact, remifentanil is a really useful surgi
Not surprising (Score:2)
Right off the bat, this article sets itself up as clueless, missing key points. Compare:
Its operators have to prepare for the unthinkable...
and
[O]ne of the most surprising features about the stockpile is that in all likelihood, it is probably incomplete.
Practically by definition, a plan to address the "unthinkable" is going to be "probably incomplete". That's no surprise. One has to think of, and address, everything one can, but then one has to be prepared to be nimble in the face of the unknown when it arrives.
What nonsense is this? (Score:2)
In an effective bio attack on the west, the attackers will reach their goal. There is no way to mount a defense fast enough, medicine does not work that way.
What prevents such an attack is that a) it is really difficult to do and b) there is no point and the people that could do such an attack all understand b). I mean, once it became known who did something like that, wherever they are would be a radioactive wasteland very fast. That means you cannot actually make any demands or even take credit. At the sa
Re: (Score:3)
Not every part of your defense system is about terrorism though it seems to be very popular with politicians who make you pay for it. Presumably they think that voters are ignorant morons so have to be constantly told that a bogyman is coming to get them in order to justify what they spend your taxes on.
The real threat is more likely the next bird flu or similar pandemic - "The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involv
OMG! (Score:1)