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DNA Computer Detects, Treats Disease
Arthur Dent '99 writes "According to this article at Reuters, Israeli scientists at the Weizmann Institute have developed a DNA computer which can automatically detect and treat prostate cancer and a form of lung cancer in laboratory experiments. Theoretically, a person could be injected with this computer, and it would detect and treat any diseased cells at the earliest stages of development, perhaps preventing the disease altogether."
Sure it sounds great now to inject someone with the self correcting units, but what happens when they start to replicate out of control? introduce tiny snakes to eat them?
What it sounds like they've done is invented a very, very simplified cell. It doesn't have the ability to reproduce, and will probably get cleaned up by the immune system in short order.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have come a step closer to creating a minuscule DNA computer that may one day be able to spot diseases like cancer from inside the body and release a drug to treat it.
Professor Ehud Shapiro and researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute constructed the world's smallest biomolecular computer a few years ago.
Now they have programmed it to analyse biological information to detect and treat prostate cancer and a form of lung cancer in laboratory experiments.
"We've taken our earlier molecular computer and augmented it with an input and output module. Together the computer can diagnose a disease and in response produce a drug for the disease in a test tube," Shapiro told Reuters.
The microscopic computer is so minuscule a trillion could fit in a drop of water. Its input, output and software are made up of DNA molecules -- which store and process encoded information about living organisms.
"Our work represents the first actual proof of concept and the first actual demonstration of a possible real-life application for this kind of computer," Shapiro added.
DIAGNOSING CANCER WITHIN THE CELL
The findings, which are published online by the science journal Nature and were presented at a symposium in Brussels, Belgium, could transform how diseases like cancer are treated in the future.
Instead of biopsies to remove cancerous tissue, which then must be analysed in the laboratory. The DNA computer could potentially diagnose the disease within the tissue in the body.
"Our medical computer might one day be administered as a drug, and be distributed throughout the body by the bloodstream to detect disease markers autonomously and independently in every cell," said Shapiro.
It could enable doctors to treat cancer in its earliest stages before tumours have formed and to deliver drugs to hard-to-reach cells if the disease has spread to other parts of the body.
Different inputs could be used to detect other diseases.
"It could work for any illness for which there is a particular pattern of over-expression or under-expression of genes which is characteristic for the disease," according to Shapiro.
He readily admits that a DNA computer roaming around the body spotting and treating disease is still a long way away.
"There are many, many hurdles. It could take decades," Shapiro said, adding that he and his colleagues had not expected to accomplish this step so quickly.
The double helix molecule of DNA that contains human genes stores data on four chemical bases -- known by the letters A, T, C and G -- giving it massive memory capability.
Shapiro's DNA computer is a molecular model of one of the simplest computing machines -- the automaton, which can answer certain yes or no questions.
It uses enzymes, which manipulate DNA, as the computer's hardware. The computer is preprogrammed with medical information and detects markers, or concentrations of certain molecules of RNA (a cousin of DNA) which are overproduced or underproduced to detect the cancer.
If the markers signify a disease, the output releases a molecule similar to an anti-cancer drug to destroy the cancerous cells.
Leonard Adleman, of the University of Southern California, pioneered the field of DNA computers a decade ago by using DNA in a test tube to solve a mathematical problem.
No it isn't, but since you're having trouble:
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have come a step closer to creating a minuscule DNA computer that may one day be able to spot diseases like cancer from inside the body and release a drug to treat it.
Professor Ehud Shapiro and researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute constructed the world's smallest biomolecular computer a few years ago.
Now they have programmed it to analyse biological information to detect and treat prostate cancer and a form of lung cancer in laboratory experiments.
"We've taken our earlier molecular computer and augmented it with an input and output module. Together the computer can diagnose a disease and in response produce a drug for the disease in a test tube," Shapiro told Reuters.
The microscopic computer is so minuscule a trillion could fit in a drop of water. Its input, output and software are made up of DNA molecules -- which store and process encoded information about living organisms.
"Our work represents the first actual proof of concept and the first actual demonstration of a possible real-life application for this kind of computer," Shapiro added.
DIAGNOSING CANCER WITHIN THE CELL
The findings, which are published online by the science journal Nature and were presented at a symposium in Brussels, Belgium, could transform how diseases like cancer are treated in the future.
Instead of biopsies to remove cancerous tissue, which then must be analysed in the laboratory. The DNA computer could potentially diagnose the disease within the tissue in the body.
"Our medical computer might one day be administered as a drug, and be distributed throughout the body by the bloodstream to detect disease markers autonomously and independently in every cell," said Shapiro.
It could enable doctors to treat cancer in its earliest stages before tumours have formed and to deliver drugs to hard-to-reach cells if the disease has spread to other parts of the body.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
No risk of that with these things. As I understand it, they'll inject a bunch of these into you, and the computers will circulate for a while, cleaning up cancer cells, until the computers get destroyed by your immune system. No reproduction, and no risk beyond a bad immune reaction.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Instead of reading a vague description of their results try the following two links:
Summary from Nature's website
Original Aritcle in Nature
Bill
You DO realize that no one has ever SEEN an HIV virus...ever...right? so "stripping it of its naughty bits" can be next to impossible in comparisson with other viruses.
And what makes you think it's powerful? the one difference between regular retro-viruses and HIV is that HIV has this annoying habit of storing itself in the brain and other hard to reach areas thus making it almost impossible to erradicate completely. If you ask me, this doesn't make it more or less "powerful" than other viruses.
HIV, for example, can let you live for an indeterminate amount of time (CDC keeps upping the limit since people just aren't dieing like they're supposed to), while a host of other viruses out there can kill you quite quickly.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Nature Magazine has an article about Biological Nanocomputers that was linked off of NPR's All Things Considered, which discussed this issue and is worth a listen (RA AND WM9). This story was followed by the audio freezer story previously, all in all a good day for NPR news.
That's an order of magnitude larger and more complex. This article is talking about working on the molecular/celluar level to halt damage, which is why they only talk about "the earliest stages"; actually repairing damage at the tissue level (i.e. late enough in the progression that the damage is causing noticeable harm) would be substantially more difficult. That would require the kinds of construction nanobots seen in scifi, which would be substantially harder to design and build. Stem cells (which nature has kindly already engineered for us) are far more promising in that area.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You can Google electron micrographs of HIV.
That aside, if we made HIV nonpathogenic, the problem would not be so much what cells it infected (cells can survive while infected by certain viruses) but rather integration into the host genome might disrupt important genes, creating a cancer risk in and of itself.
HIV storing itself in memory lymphocytes is probably more important in the difficulty of clearing the virus than living in the brain.
No.
a) This nucleotide sequence isn't likely to interact with any human-made malicious ones as it is not linked to any conventional computer network or disk drive. Even if you were to cross-contaminate with something nasty, this thing doesn't self-replicate, which limits its ability to spread. (If we did make something de novo that self-replicated, that would be the news item, whether it carried a nasty or not.) Also, this DNA computer is subject to the same stray nucleotide degradation rules and enzymes as anything else.
b) For something to infect this class of computer, either it has to be in the wild long enough for *something* to adapt its infectious abilities to this DNA computer, or we have to engineer something that does the same.
c) Granted, you could swap the medicine/inhibitor loop for something nasty, but that technology is at least ten years away from the average skript kiddie.
-M5B
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
What they have done, which is cool, clever and generally admirable, is to add an input (detect protein A, or RNA strand B, etc.) that triggers an appropriate output (synthesise protein C, or make enzyme D to release drug E).
This is incredibly powerful - indeed it is 90% of the way to the 'magic bullet' that was the grail of cancer research a few years back (there's no method for delivery into the cell yet, but I'm sure a viroid shell for anti-cancer drugs is possible), and the guys deserve a Nobel prize for this if it lives up to its potential.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Sorry to sound abrupt, but evolving? Evolving my arse.
Cancer isn't an organism, it's a fairly well defined malfunction in various types of cell in your body - which don't tend to evolve at all these days, due to the lack of selection pressure.
Only a few cancers can be characterised by excess RNA or by specific marker proteins at present - that's why they have concentrated on prostrate cancer and a form of lung cancer for their proof-of-concept. As more markers are identified, this method will become more generally applicable, and you'll eventually be able to have an annual 'anti-cancer shot' that will be much the same from year to year, except for having additional cancers added to it.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
I apologize for the back-to-back posting.. but I figured I'd throw in a bit of my pharmacy background.
I'm sure by your text-book definition of cancer, you're correct. However, I've seen may patients on Tamoxifen. I've been with them througout their battle(s) with cancer. Tamoxifen doesn't work for every type of breast cancer, obviously. It does work for some types, however, cancer cells do adapt (despite what you say) to conditions within the body. Suddenly, the Tamoxifen may no longer work. It's not that the body has built a tolerance to the drug, it's that the cancer cells have adapted and... evolved beyond the affects of the medicine - in order to survive.
This of course won't be passed from person to person, though, I have my theory on cancer/genetics.. but that's another matter. However, I do think that if the trait for cancer (likelihood.. if you don't like the word trait) is passed down, would the cell's adaptation be passed too? Guess that's kind of a rhetorical question, I don't claim to know the answer.
There are many types of cancer that DO evolve, exactly in the sense of an organism as well. TGCT is a perfect example of this.
Anyway...
Full Text of the Nature article (without the ridiculous Nature subscription price)
Links to associated material here
-zAmboni
Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop
We have the complete sequence of HIV and know all of the "naughty bits" already. (NCBI Sequence) Stripping them would limit the use of the virus though since the "naughty bits" are what make is so effective.