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Researchers Find Off Protein For Immune System
canning writes "A team of Canadian scientists has discovered the "Holy Grail" of the signalling process
the human body uses to control its immune system, a finding that could one day halt
the development of cancer, diabetes, arthritis and heart disease.
This article explains what Dr. Penninger's team plans to accomplish with such a discovery and gives a brief history of this highly successful group of researchers."
Cancer is when the chemicals in your body that regulate things go haywire and start telling things to start doing things that they should not do. If you know what those chemicals are you have a big edge in treating the cancer.
And if Saddam wants a bomb to threaten the USA he would be better off with Anthrax or TB.
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Also if you could selectivly turn off parts of the immune system it would make transplants much easer.
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Naw - If those Somalis dare come over here on American soil:
We'll run their skinny asses over with our SUVs.
We'll shoot them with our concealed-carry handguns.
We'll clog their arteries with McDonald's cheeseburgers.
We'll poison their minds with kiddie pr0n from the internet.
We'll despoil their women with breast implants.
We'll get them hooked on bad pop music and flashy special-effects movies, then control their access with copy-protection schemes and have them paying $8 per viewing per episode of Friends.
We'll darken their eyes with rolling blackouts.
Americans are much more well-adapted to survival in this environment. The average Somali wouldn't last 2 weeks.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You're right, ./ DOES need a science editor. Anybody know if Bill Nye is available?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Research is, in fact, one of the most open sourced processes going on.
Researchers get their status and thus their grant money from the number of publications and the number of times their publications are quoted by other publications, so it is in their best interest to make publications as easily obtainable as possible
For example, check out the arXiv preprint archive, which contains a large proportion of all publications in physics (at least for my field, soft condensed matter physics), in postscript and LaTeX source (!).
Of course, commercial journal publisher (like Elsevier) use this to obtain full copyright on articles, and publishing them in journals which cost 10s of thousands of dollars for a subscription. A good university or institute can't do without them, because they have a natural monopoly on what's published.
Sander
Now with that wonder of the world in the bag, we can start building modules for the space ark.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Funny? Not really, though your title was stated humorously, I feel that your points are quite serious.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Type 1 diabetes is almost always caused by an incorrect immune system response. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system typically attacks the Beta cells in your pancreas that create Insulin for you.
Arthritis (more specifically rheumatoid arthritis) is caused by the body's immune system attacking the cartiledge layers in between your joints. Under attack the cartiledge layers become inflamed, causing the characteristic joint swelling and immobility.
Heart Disease is a common term to describe medical conditions that cause damage to the heart. These can be physical conditions (such as obstructions to the blood supply to the heart), viral/bacterial infections, or auto-immune responses.
More information on Diabetes can be found at the American Diabetes Association. Information on Rheumatoid Arthritis can be found at the Arthritis Foundation
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The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Americans are getting fatter, lazier and dumber, they will eventually be wiped out by the tougher, craftier Somalis.
Providing the Somalis evolve an immunity to cruise missiles.....
Selection criteria these days are more likely to be based on governmental economic know-how than tougness or craftiness.
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The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
I know a while ago they were working on a system where they'd bind something (usually a bad-ass toxin) to a specific antibody and they could use that to go find cancer cells and kick their asses... Something like that may be useful here...
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Play Six Pack Man. I
While this makes sense logically, it is obviously not necessary to isolate any endogenous ligands to the cd45 (although several are already known). What is needed is a careful study to determine whether cd45 activation is lower in actual patients with immune-mediated disease. If not, it would be nice to see whether increased stimulation of cd45 would suppress the immune system and block progression of the disease. Then, a drug might be developed which would stimulate the cd45. However, due to the decreased erythropoiesis this would cause, such a drug would probably not be helpful for chronic (ie MOST) immune diseases.
Invicta{HOG}
> This means that if you advocate medicine, you eventually will also have to advocate genetic engineering of offspring, because you will have to fix bad genes which will accumulate
Given the definition of "bad" as "would be detrimental to survival without medical intervention", which a a normal human point of view, that is a good point.
> and don't tell me that "no gene is bad,
Ah, the intersection of the evolutionary and personal human viewpoints. In one sense, no gene is bad. It is a collection of atoms. It just is. In another, it is less fit for most environments than others, and is therfor bad.
> As I use to say, the religions that refuse medical treatment at all are not as zany as they seem to be.
Yup, it's that good of the individual vs. good of the species thing again.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
> - the fittest no longer survive.
.com billionaires? Do Dumb/unlucky/reckless people still get killed before they breed? Is there still differential reproduction based on some (any) criteria? Point made already.
A common misconception. Darwin's use of the word "fittest" *does not* mean "most healthy", it means "best fit to the environment". All that's happened is that the environmental selection criteria have changed. Our environment, for instance, is no longer so unfriendly towards short-sighted people.
> Now everyone makes it,
Do they? Do homeless people have as many children as
You cannot escape natural selection. Ever.
Anyway, for 80% of the earth's population, the selection criteria are the same as they ever where. Which is why whilst Americans are getting fatter, lazier and dumber, they will eventually be wiped out by the tougher, craftier Somalis. This IMHO a good thing - the good of the individual is not the good of the species.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
-- Albert Einstein
Do domain names matter?
The catch is that we don't live long enough for smartness to outpace beauty. If we all lived 200 year old lives, I am sure the cult of the "beautiful people" will simply disappear.
Tomato that stays juicy for the whole year already "regulates the immune system!"
But the tomato acts indirectly and this new knowledge will be applied directly and explicitely. Big deal, didn't you hear, the cancer growth could be stopped with this in cancer patients. I don't think they would mind.
You can't handle the truth.
...could, of course, have some interesting repercussions. It surprises me that the enthusiasm of the press always seems to outweigh their analytical capabilities, especially in the area of health reporting.
Why doesn't anyone mention that this really needs to be a tightly controlled manipulation of CD45, rather than just a big, system wide shutdown? Sort of like blocking the sun to stop the rampaging robot agents? =)
Still, way cool.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
The key here is that some of the mice had been genetically engineered without the ability to produce CD45. The mice were then infected with the virus, and their immune systems responded.
Now comes the interesting part. What happens when their bodies successfully stave off the infection? The normal mice use CD45 to subdue their immune response, but the altered mice's bodies keep attacking cells. The article doesn't go into enough detail about this, but I suspect it gave them something like cancer. Or lupus. Both of these can be seen as a sort of out-of-control immune response. CD45 might give people with these diseases the ability to bring their immune system back in control.
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Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
Yep, the "delicate balance" of human body has certainly been affected, why else would so many suffer from heart attacks, cancer, arithitis, allergies and so on?
We are fighting against this "imbalance" in our bodies with precision drugs. Medical science has been going fast forward for some time now, but how many degenerative diseases have been cured?
Take a look at how our environment (foods eaten, exercise, air quality, intake of various chemicals, stress level) has changed from the time we evolved.
Do you see a system incompability issue?
Good luck debugging!
The fact is, virtually any kind of research has it's dangers. But claiming that we shouldn't do this kind of research, simply because there's potentially evil uses for the knowledge? That's plain ridiculous.
For years, scientists thought that they knew everything there was to know about how CD45 functions. Here's a bit of what Dr. Penninger had to say about the discovery (Nature)
"People weren't interested in it any more, because everyone thought they knew what it was doing. We only found this because we wanted to revisit an old finding." "This, I found scientifically exciting. There we were thinking we had figured out this thing and then we had a completely new function which we had missed for the last 10 years. This was definitely a Eureka moment."
I think that this could be a good development, but I'm curious as to how they're going to test this without making anybody croak.
One more thing: we're slowly destroying Darwin's theory - the fittest no longer survive. Now everyone makes it, even if they have some genetic disease that gives them no chance in life. It's just another view to consider...
My karma's bigger than yours!
SIG: HUP
Are you asserting that if our government cuts off funds for this research, then no one in the world is ever going to make inroads along these lines?
No, I'm sure that other countries could manage to develop these things sooner or later, it's just that because America leads the world in terms of free market capitalism it has a much higher amount of money placed into research and development than socialist economies like England or France.
Or are you merely stating that the government should take a hand in what people it funds, in terms of restricting the nationalities of whom these research facilities employ?
Well I suppose only employing American nationals would cut down on security risks, but that wasn't what I meant at all.
Or are you requesting that these sorts of discoveries not be publicized in the media, for fear of researchers being kidnapped by enemy nations, so that their discoveries can be used for destructive goals?
Not kidnapping, no, do you think this is some Third World dictatorship? But if knowledge like this is placed into the public domain we are basically giving away the fruits of our labors, and this is in no way consistent with the sensible capitalist policies that has seen our nation outstrip the rest of the world in every way that counts.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
This is not a national Security risk, you could not make bomb of this stuff, you would need to inject it personaly.
How naive. Genetic engineering is done via means of a tailored virus that inserts the modified DNA into someone's chromosomes, this could, with some research, the made into an aitborn virus which spread CD45 blockers throughout a population relatively easily.
And if Saddam wants a bomb to threaten the USA he would be better off with Anthrax or TB.
Both of which are quite difficult to get hold of and not nearly as deadly.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Although I've kept a concerned eye on the risks of biotech as a whole, this advance in the state of scientific knowledge is quite incredibly worrying for anyone considering the wider ramifications of biotechnology. I mean, it's one thing to make a tomato that stays juicy for longer, it's a different thing entirely to play around with the chemical that regulates the immune system!
I mean come on folks, this is getting to the point where there are immense risks to the health of millions. As the article says, mice which couldn't make the protein CD45 died very quickly from cancers and auto-immune diseases. This sounds like a perfect opportunity for nefarious rogue states to develop biological weapons for use against Western targets. I'm sure Saddamn would like to have a "cancer bomb" with which to threaten the US.
Although scientific openness has got us this far, I think that when it comes to developments that are inherently dangerous we need to have a little less self-promotion and a lot more respect for the potential consequences. Government bodies that fund these projects should be a lot stricter about the conditions for which they grant research funds to ensure national security in the face of a world increasingly anatagonistic to our rich culture.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
...but what will we lose ?
Don't play with Mother Nature to counterpart the effects of some (mostly) human problem.
If this CD45 can just help regulate immunity, won't there be another molecul that would prefer that we don't play with it?
I bet I'd prefer to keep my sane life instead of taking one more drug.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
Cell turns on, cell turns off...
Seriously though - it's nice to see that some of the mechanisms in the human body at the cellular level are starting to come together.
I won't be holding my breath for miracle cures in the next year or two, but in 10 years, I think we could expect directed control over some normally rampant disorders.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
The article fails to mention an intersting point. The immune systems is connected to the brain via a system of chemical messengers. The "miracle" stories of cancer patients diagnosed as terminally ill and then recovering in a year are often given as examples of mind-over-body quality of human organism.
CD45 actually works on the cell side of the immune systems, causing cell death when receiving a certain chemical messenger. Locating CD45 only helps scientists to know which genetic switch to target, but finding the brain's chemical messenger that turns CD45 on or off will actually lead to the cure to cancel.
another article from the National Post's magazine. You'll have to click on the article "Of Mice and Men" on the main page as there is no direct link.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
But what about those networks.... In short others will provide resources to those who cannot provide for themselves. Humans aren't the only animals that do this, but we are certainly the only ones that do it on the scale of millions, and our effectiveness in this endevour is difficult for the animal kingdom to match. (Note that examples of bees, ants etc, and any animal raising young don't apply as they're genetically related.) We use our network sort of like karma. We constantly put a little good karma in the bank and know that if we need to make a withdrawl the bank will be there even if we need to take out more than we've put in. Hell, our taxes and FEMA help buy new houses for people who live on rivers that flood every damn year, yet who for some reason didn't think to buy flood insurance. The farther someone is from me the less responsibility I have. If someone has a heart attack in front of me, I have the obligation to at least call 911 and perform CPR if I can. Farther away? I might just contribute some of my tax dollars. Another country? Foreign aid programs, buying habbits, charity. Other social networks in other countries will work in similar fashions, but they might not be as rich and powerful as the one I enjoy. If people can choose which network to be in why wouldn't they choose the best? They will, they do. Sometimes they pay smugglers a lot of money to pack them into a shipping container for a trip they might not survive. Or maybe they're smart, or beautiful.
In short, our social network insulates us from enviromental pressures. It does however create new pressures. But Darwin's theory only applied to enviromental pressures, should one apply the hypothesis to social pressures one must draw different conclusions. People aren't rich because they're better people, they're rich because they're fortunate to be rich in the vast majority of cases. Poor people aren't poor because they deserve it. Strict application of Darwin's ideas to our social structure leads to some fairly stupid expectations. At this point in time, our only real enviromental pressures are global warming (if you believe in bad science), or a celestial object striking the earth.
Lemme pose a question: Which is better being beautiful, or smart? I'd say beautiful. If you're smart you can create opportunity, but if you're beautiful other people do that for you.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.