Slashdot Mirror

Here is one of many papers, "Neuronal degeneration and mitochondrial dysfunction", where mitochondrial DNA does seem to "affect a damn thing in your body outside the Mitochondria".

Would you like to retract your kneejerk claim now or later?

'In any virus intended for therapeutic use in humans, allowing the virus to retain its reproductive mechanisms is just a bad idea.'

Not necessarily. Obviously there are risks (and this is just a proof of concept experiment), but as the original paper explains:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1000440

'Viruses have a highly successful history as prophylactic vaccines and are also being developed for their intrinsic anticancer activities. In both settings the ability to undergo restricted replication is highly desirable. Attenuated (but not killed) viral strains often represent the most effective viral vaccines, affording the possibility of persistent low level infection without significant pathology.'

In other words, you want the virus to replicate in a controlled way, so that (e.g.) it hits more cancer cells than a non-replicating vector. Traditionally, 'attenuated' viruses have been used for vaccines and for anti-tumour experiments, but this tends to make them less effective than they might otherwise be. The trick they've used in this paper is selective attenuation - they've inserted an 'off switch' that responds to a microRNA that's expressed in liver (where the virus might do harm), but not elsewhere (where the virus is needed). Also, the adenovirus used in these studies isn't some exotic replicating construct with a deadly payload, but a rather common virus that generally causes mild disease even in its unattenuated form. It may not even be necessary to deliver a foreign gene to the tumour - replication-selective but otherwise normal adenoviruses can have intrinsic anti-tumour ('oncolytic') activity if they are engineered to prefer replicating in tumour cells. One common strategy is to delete a viral gene normally used to evade the cell's p53 response. The virus can then only replicate in cells with an already damaged p53 pathway (like many tumour cells!):

http://www.jci.org/articles/view/9762

If you were to read the abstract of the scientific publication ( http://www.jci.org/cgi/content/abstract/JCI24767v1 - click on Full PDF to view the entire article), you would notice that the aP2 protein "regulates allergic airway inflammation and may provide a link between fatty acid metabolism and asthma".

So, it is involved in the host's immune response to an antigen(whether the antigen is an allergen, a virus, etc). Usually, I consider such a immune response to be beneficial, since it allows the body to respond to an exposure. However, in the case of asthma the inflammation becomes excessive.

Perhaps you should do some research before spouting off caustic remarks like that. There are quite a few studies that show THC and other marijuana components could have anti-cancer & tumor properties. I've linked a few, you can do the rest of the legwork.

http://jpet.aspetjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract /jpet.103.061002v1
http://www.jci.org/cgi/content/full/111/1/43
http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/17/3/529
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/20 05/08/29/newscolumn6.html

Actual paper can be found here.

A much bigger story this week is the striking result of a clinical trial of male circumcision. Apparently circumcised men have a 70% lower risk of contracting HIV than uncircumcised men (see here). Though others have shown this anecdotally, proof in a large clinical trial could revolutionize HIV prevention -- particularly in sub-Saharan countries where HIV incidence is high and male circumcision is currently rare.