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New Antiviral May Cure Common Cold
Max Karpiak writes "CNN is reporting on a new antiviral which may cure the common cold as well as many other viral infections. What's especially cool is the way this drug was created: it was designed specifically to counter viruses, not just discovered in a hit-or-miss fashon. Geeks designing molecules to attack viruses? Awesome!" Neat stuff. So, what other "fantastic" science applications are on the verge of actually entering the market?
Hmm...
Norton AntiVirus (Organic Edition)
Peter Norton's guide to Home Health.
# shiver # - No thanks.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
The cold is just one of the many diseases this can supposedly stop. The article says "Pleconaril (prounounced plah-CONN-ah-rill) is the latest in a short list of medicines that kill viruses. This drug, in fact, blocks an entire category of them, a collection of 169 distinctly different nasties that together cause more human disease than any other."
This sounds like it could be a very big deal for developing nations, not just "the cushy part of the world". The problem is the price -- the company wants $50-100 for a single treatment. I wonder what their costs actually are, and if they'll lower prices once they've paid for development.
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A problem we're currently seeing with bacteria and common antibiotics and anti-bacterial products in the house is that you're enforcing natural selection rather rigorously and the bacteria that survive do so because they're naturally resistant to the drug. You end up getting antibiotic immune superbacteria. Any chance this could happen with the virii too? How many virus molecules do you get in a given cold? How prone are they to evolve a defense for this stuff? Though I suppose it doesn't matter since there's no way to cure them now anyway...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Don't try to outsmart yourself with Latin. The correct plural is "viruses".
Natural selection happens. It will happen with this drug. It will happen without this drug. It will happen on a train. It will happen on a plane. It is impossible (or nearly so) to stop. Unless biology changes drastically, evolution will keep going until every strain of every organism is obliterated.
Good biologists laugh, cry and bang their heads in frustration when people worry about whether resistance against some deadly substance will happen. The evolution of many organisms is hard to track because we do not notice great survival pressures bearing down on them. Provide enough pressure, and the organisms will evolve. If a drug, pesticide or herbicide is good enough, it will provide selective pressure. Evolution will happen. It happened against superpesticides that farmers thought would work forever. It happened against our miracle drugs.
The smart doctors and farmers have stopped thinking ridiculous thoughts such as, "Will evolution happen this time?" They know that, somehow, it will. Even if they drive one species to extinction, another one can take its place. They concentrate on finding methods that make their weapons as effective as possible for as long as possible.
Viruses are not living according to the biologists I know. They probably would not call them organisms. Many viruses carry DNA, just as living organisms do. Some carry RNA, and it functions similarly. All DNA and RNA molecules are subject to damage and to errors in base pairing. Mutation is going to happen. When mutation happens, evolution can and will happen.
The promise of carefully designed drugs is that we can keep pace with evolution better. Much drug development is still done with a shotgun. Researchers expose the bugs to chemicals and pick out the effective ones. We do not understand how many antimicrobials work. We just know that they do work and that they are not too toxic. By understanding disease mechanisms, more drugs can be designed and not just discovered. Even when a new bug appears, researchers will be able to discover how it works and to design chemicals that interfere.
What's especially cool is the way this drug was created: it was designed specifically to counter viruses, not just discovered in a hit-or-miss fashon.
It's not just cool. We're going to need this capability.
In some ways you can view viruses such as influenza or hantavirus as a kind of natural defense. They live for generations in natural populations of birds and rodents with little or no ill effects, and in some cases have been incorporated into the genese of the hosts. Humans probably have hundreds, if not thousands of viruses that are passed down through our stem cells. When an immunolgically naive population tries to muscle in on the terrirtory -- blamm! They're infected,like they were hit by a biological land mine. Disrupting a natural ecosystem can cause a species, for example deer, to explode, with their endemic diseases like Lyme disease to explode.
People are moving places they didn't go before (because of what we used to call "pestilence"), peturbing the natural ecology there, and moving with unprecedented speed across the globe. This means that completely novel viruses like Ebola or can be uncovered. Also, disease once endemic to limited areas such as West Nile encephelitis can be spread rapidly to new areas such as the Northeast US. It's no different from Kudzu or Zebra mussels except that it's on the microscopic scale and the ecosystem being colonized is us.
While there is at least a little doubt about global warming, what is clear is that climate is warming around inhabited parts of the planet. This increases, or at least changes the range of disease carrying organisms like certain mosquito species in places where they come into proximity with people. Mexico city is protected by its altitude from Malaria, but as the city expands and the region warms, the vertical range of Malaria bearing mosquitoes is increasing.
We don't take this very seriously, but a disease like Yellow Fever can kill thousands. At the end of the 18th century, Philidelphia almost collapsed because of a Yellow Fever epidemic. In the 1890s ten percent of the population of Jacksonville and something like half the population of the city fled. This led to the start of mosquito control programs in Florida; however it's not clear whether we've just had blind luck so far that it hasn't happened again. Historically, Yellow Fever has struck as far North as New York City.
Also, increasing population makes more aggressive "tactics" work better for these infectious agents. Remember the Volterra predator prey equation in Diff EQ? It's a microbe's banquet out there.
We either have to develop the ability to quickly tailor medicines to completely novel infectious agents, perhaps combined with vector control, OR we have to radically change our civilization to reduce population growth, restrict population movements into virgin territory (especially tropical), reduce our impact on environment, and generally reduce the level of global travel. These things might be worth doing in themselves, but speaking as someone who has at least a bit of a leaning towards environmentalism, I'm not optimistic about our ability to set the direction of our civilization out of our own volition.
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