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Anti-HIV Virus Developed
liam193 writes "Wired News is reporting that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may have developed a virus that fights the HIV virus. According to the article, 'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'"
If this proves effective, I can anticipate people who'll get the treatment, then use that as another item on their list of "why you should have unsafe sex with me tonight". That may be a more entertaining way for more people to get "treated" than visiting their doctors, but HIV isn't the only nasty little bugger out there. We could end up with an epidemic of hepatitis and other STDs.
"I can't say now it won't make it worse," Arkin said.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Why should this scare anybody? Alot of discoveries are just happenstance, or maybe it took somebody to think outside of the box, or maybe they are super geniuses
My point is, if you can call it that, is that it doesn't always take a 50 Billion dollar military grant to come up with something to change the world. Ask the guy that invented the wheel.
This is scary stuff. Not the limiting of HIV, but the fact that it passes itself along just like the real thing. All sorts of interesting payloads possible here.....
Where's the beef?
The facts: A pair of researchers have managed to adapt HIV to a virus which fights HIV. It's not their idea (as far as I can see), and so far they've only tested it in computer simulations (which are basically not to be trusted as a good model of the human immune system, trust me, I do computational biochem), also they've killed HIV in a petri dish.
Killing HIV in a petri dish is not new, there's quite a few things that do that.
I'm not dismissing the idea, but y'all better keep those champange bottles on ice for a few years until the in vivo studies have been conducted.
'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'
Developing a potential treatment for AIDS is, after all, relatively easy. Doing all of the studies necessary before releasing an engineered virus into the wild, now that's both difficult and expensive. Very difficult, and very expensive, in terms of highly dangerous controlled tests, especially over large amounts of time.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
While this is good news for people suffering AIDS. I would not put it in the cure department. The article did not say the anti-HIV virus irradicated HIV, just checked its mutation into AIDS. The results of calling such a treatment a cure would probably be an increased spread of AIDS.
The scary part for them is that they're fighting a virus with another virus, and they don't know what kind of viral-mutation hell that might bring.
$200K is not enough to test that mutations will be stopped. And if HIV didn't mutate so tenaciously, we would have had a cure years ago.
Remember the "vaccine" based on a "crippled" HIV virus unable to cause the disease. Test it on monkeys and give it some time, and it turns out it "uncripples" itself by mutation once in a while. Ooops! Good thing that never made it to human trials! HIV sucks.
Just because a virus is artificial doesn't mean it's going to be controllable.
There's been a new "virus treatment" almost every year, and each supposedly showing promise to cure cancer, or AIDS, etc. In fact, as far back as the 1930s, people have been attempting to use bacteriophage viruses as antibiotics.
All the experiments generally end up failing for one simple reason: your body has an immune system. And the immune system will attack the good virus and eliminiate it quickly.
This promising new HIV is special because it lacks the ability to kill white blood cells. Common sense says since it can't kill them, it'll be destroyed by them. Either that, or due to natural selection, the normal HIV that *can* kill will crowd out the "good" HIV.
According to the article this is still not a cure for HIV since the virus will become less effective as the HIV infected cells begin to dwindle in numbers.
So don't throw out the rubbers just yet.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
So Arkin and Schaffer are instead calling the process "synthetic biology." Despite appearances, it's not an arbitrary term: The researchers are synthesizing biological elements into machines to do their bidding.
Wow, some computer scientists discover biology and think they thought of things nobody ever thought of before. "Synthetic biology" is as old as molecular biology--that's what all those wonderful tools Arkin is playing around with were developed for. That's why he can buy the enzymes, chemicals, cell lines, DNA, and other components from dozens of vendors. Furthermore, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and other non-biologists, have been looking at biological problems for decades, so crossing disciplines is hardly new.
So, Arkin's general approach (as well as the general approach of the whole "synthetic biology" crowd) is nothing new. It is possible that he has come up with a specific new mechanism for interfering with HIV, but plenty of thought has gone into the careful design of similar schemes before and they have failed to work in humans.
Arkin may or may not have done some decent science in this work. But it foremost sounds like an attempt to grab attention. And that isn't nice: it not just detracts from other good research, in the case of proclaiming an HIV cure, it has the potential to hurt people.
'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS.
Two people and a grad student, eh? So the student doesn't get any credit.
Sad.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
The article points out that both the HIV virus and the engineered "cure" can be transmitted from person to person.
I think the point you are trying to make is that while this engineered virus may inhibit the effects of HIV, it does not destroy the HIV virus. People may become even more complacent about sex than they are now.
Moreover, what happens if either of the viruses mutate? You could potentially lose the protective effects of the engineered virus and find yourself infected with a new strain of HIV.
If you're a bio major, you should know that "virii" isn't a word.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Most test actually look for byproducts of a condition, verus the condition itself. However, this makes me wonder if you catch the "good" aids virus if you will test positive for HIV.
We would then need another way to test to see if you have any of the real thing, or just caught the unreal thing from someone else.
I wonder if it gets passed from Mother to child...usually aids doesn't, but there is still a pretty good chance.
This isn't a cure, either.
There's no question that the medical-industrial complex is motivated primarily by profit. It's disgusting. But anyone who thinks the the focus on treatments instead of a cure is motivated simply by greed... doesn't really understand just how challenging an actual cure would be to create. Even the best ideas out there (funded or not) would be very difficult to make work.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
... and people still won't accept the easiest (and in fact only certain) way to prevent the spread of AIDS:
Don't have promiscuious sex.
And that's it. Nothing more than that.
But you'd have a hard time getting a message like that past PC liberals who seem to have taken up key positions of authority, and those tribes in Africa who believe the best way to cure aids is to have sex with a virgin. I wonder who told them that.
The other entry vector is blood transfer, but it's not exactly every-day practice (ie if you get AIDS through a blood transfer you're very unlikely to transfer your blood to somebody else before you start having symptoms).
So if people would simply keep it in their pants we could stop AIDS dead in its tracks within 5 years.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Actually, no.
HIV is a lentivirus, a subcategory of the retroviruses. HIV virions package two, negative strand RNA molecules. Within a cell, the HIV reverse transcriptase synthesizes cDNA that integrates into the host cell. The low replication fidelity of the reverse transcriptase is what accounts for HIV's incredible ability to rapidly escape from drug treatment and immune responses.
Unfortunately, the Wired article doesn't provide many scientific details. The idea is pretty creative, but there is a huge difference between simulating a cure (and even making one in a test tube) and finding a cure that works in animals. A few concerns off the top of my head:
1) Recombination between HIV and the treatment vector. Remember those two strands of RNA I talked about above? You can get mosaic viruses that resemble part of one virus and a second part of another. I'd be willing to bet that this is the 'it could make things worse' aspect mentioned at the botom of the article.
2) Any time you insert foreign DNA into the genomic DNA of cels (as would occur with this anti-HIV, if I understand it correctly), bad things can happen.
3) Attenuating (or weakening) HIV has been widely tested as a vaccine. And basically, it works, at least in monkeys. If you give monkeys an attenuated version of SIV (monkey AIDS virus), the monkeys are basically protected against full-blown SIV. So why isn't this a vaccine that is being used in people? Monkeys that have weakened immune systems, are young, are old, or just have plain bad luck eventually get sick and die...from the attenuated strain of the virus. In other words, the attenuated vaccine makes the monkeys sick. The 'anti-HIV' sounds like a different riff on the same theme, with the possible caveat that they are looking to use it on people who are already infected, unlike a vaccine which would be used on uninfected people to prevent infection.
Just my two cents. My cred: 8 years in HIV research, with a Ph.D. in it.
'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'
I suspect it took a lot more money and people than that -- let's not forget the billions of dollars and millions of man hours that went into the effort to effectively combat AIDS before this?
Often we hit upon success not by knowing to look, but by knowing where not to look based on the work of our predecessors.
- sm
And also that a "single strain" and a single strand are definitely two different things...
Although I HAVE actually heard a few people use the term virii when referencing multiple DIFFERENT viruses. But I have never seen it in any literature so it is probably just geek vernacular to an extent...
I disagree.
1) Most of the human race IS NOT infected with HIV/AIDS. Talking about AIDS like it is the plague is overestimating it dramatically. AIDS simply isn't that infectious. For crying out loud, you have to exchange BLOOD or have sex with someone to get it, same as Ebola. The reason we don't have millions running around with Ebola is victims get symptoms/die right away (comparatively) and we QUARENTINE them. AIDS will never be as deadly as smallpox, diptheria, et.al. are/were. It's method of contagion is way too limiting.
2) There really is a substantial minority of the population that is monogamous (or celibate - consider \.). They are under almost no threat from AIDS. If the epidemic continues long enough, behaviors will change, or at least people exhibit non-monogamous behavior will be come more rare. Plain old evolution in action.
Assuming, of course, that we don't find a real cure/vaccine.
In short, you can imagine in a thousand years the human race having lost all technology for whatever reason - and still surviving. There might be much stronger taboos against non-monogamous behavior, and these ignorant future humans might have forgotten _WHY_ they have these taboos... but they won't be wiped out.
Actually, thinking cynically about it, you'd expect that after a while the local strong man would decide that the taboo wasn't working for him and he needed women more/more women than the geeky toolmaker did, so that taboo would have to become "toolmakers must be complete celibate, and chiefs must have all the women". Just human nature in action...
Unless all those strong men are genetically eliminated by the evolutionary effects of AIDS?? Finally, geeks rule!! (KIDDING!!! no, I don't want to see ANYONE die from AIDS, even jocks who deserve it.)
If biology hasn't changed over the last few years, it doesn't mean that at all.
The set of hosts will be reduced from now, though there are two things that would effectively get rid of HIV; have everyone die (no hosts), have everyone get checked frequently and use a tool to nuke it. Both have worked in the past for a variety of bacterial/viral diseases.
What this anti-HIV virus allows is for the HIV virus to exist without killing the host and to continue to be transmitted. Sure, it does not get the host forever...though that doesn't seem to be a problem for the sets of viruses that are spread each year. After all, when is the last time you had a STD test?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The article mentions this. It also mentions the importance of computer simulations for this technique and other failures. As a molecular biologist you might enjoy reading the article.
Nah...you'll only HAVE to swing one way. Propogate the virus to another of the opposite sex and ..poof...you have a pair of people who can mate with most any person in the world and spread the virus.
I'm not too worried about this. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you are suggesting that this might be used by terrorists to inflict damage on a world they don't like.
If so, the problem with this is that for the really damaging stuff - airborne spread viruses - the damage would almost inveitably be worse in the third world than in the Western world.
Comparatively, we've got the doctors, hospitals, and support systems to reduce the severity of a plague. The third world doesn't. Also, Western lifestyles are generally less plague succeptable - we have generally larger personal spaces, which reduces contagion rates. The population is generally literate, and tends to believe authorities when they issue directives on health and safety. The third world, by contrast, live in larger family units, don't generally have good disease theory awareness, and are prone to relying on traditional beliefs and remedies that are unlikely to be effective against this kind of pandemic.
Inflicting a highly contagious disease might be a "reasonable" thing for a radical environmental group that believes the human population is wildly excessive. It might also work for a nilhist or apocaleptic group. But most groups really have a vision for planet Earth that includes most of their relatives still alive. For those groups, particularly those from undeveloped countries, wildly contagious biological weapons don't make sense.
Now, if you could target your virus at one particular race, then your on VERY dangerous ground. There are any number of racial conflict around the world that participants might be tempted to settle by wiping out the other side entirely.
Worse than that, computer viruses don't evolve by themselves, but biological ones have that capability. A bad replication or mutation of that virus and we could have a new disease instead a new cure.
In the other hand, some vaccines already uses somewhat disabled diseases to cure them. And worked, and the worst not happened. If we have the opportunity to eliminate a for sure killer disease risking a not so likely future new disease, maybe the risk worths it.
I think what's scary is that they've developed a treatment that spreads itself just like a virus, along with HIV. What that means is that once it's in the wild, it's gonna spread like any other virus and, probably, mutate like any other virus.
That's an ethical conundrum from hell - is it moral to infect people with a virus of unknown long-term effects that cures a known killer disease?
That actually depends which strain you're talking about.
The Reston strain is airborne, but is not fatal to humans. The problem, however, is that Reston is very similar to the Sudan and Zaire strains, so airborne mutations are not out of the question for the other strains. Additionally, at late stages when R & Z are extremely infectious, coughing will spew droplets of blood, which if care is not taken will infect others who breath them in.
Some information taken from here
See also: Wikipedia
And, no, I should not have used the goddamn Preview mode first.
I always thought Unbelievably Cynical would be a +1
Why not get the real ultimate power?
They couldn't even put it into remission..it's just a countdown to death...and all the Doc's could do is slow it down abit.
It scares them because the pharmaceutical companies would want to kill them. Those guys have spent billions and haven't produced a cure. :)
Hence, a seropositive male almost always produces seronegative offspring, assuming the mother is not infected. It would be unusual for a fetus ever to acquire HIV infection directly from the father. The developing embryo simply does not have the CD4+ receptor that HIV latches on to, until much later in development.
HIV transmission is not like Mendelian genetics.NEWSFLASH. It's May.
The interesting thing here is that they have done something cheaply, not something new. The idea of curing a virus with a virus is not new, as someone already pointed out. The difference with what has been done, and what is being presented as something that should be done, is this.
Smallpox killed a _lot_ of people.
AIDs kills no one. It makes it possible for another disease to eliminate you, any other disease. The only interesting thought that I get out of this is simply, if we're going to attempt to cure AIDs by gene therapy, we should take a look at therapeutically altering the immune system to make it AIDs capable instead of its current state, in which it is incapable of dealing with it.
AIDs is not unique in its status of being a virus that our bodies cannot fight or loses the battle with, several disease are like that.
I think it would be awesome if we could derive a virus gene therapy that would make our immune systems disease proof. Not eternal life by any stretch of the imagination, but losing life to viruses is horrible, especially when this life stealing virus' means of propagation is our own...
Just some thoughts...
-LoneWolf-
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
It spreads very, very badly.
Imagine HIV spreading by air.
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