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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.'"
A virus which kicks the other ones ass and then take up patrol duty. "Arkin and his colleagues have designed a potential AIDS treatment that would remain with the patient as long as he or she has HIV, meaning it would prevent AIDS from arising even in patients who otherwise would have developed the disease after a decade of latency" And not only that but they made it out of the HIV virus, damn fine work.
vampirical
[tin foil hat]While this case may be (almost certainly is) good, I think the day is coming when it will get out of hand and we will see the accidental release of some real nasty man made viral stuff into the environment.[/tin foil hat]
I'll admit to not RTFA, but for people to say it is scary that a couple grad students with $200,000 were able to do this is unfortunate. I'm assuming they mean they are scared that the heavyweights couldn't do it with hundreds of millions of dollars, and yet a couple grad students do it with $200k. Ugh. To put profits so far above people's health truly is sad.
No doubt they could invent an anti-hepatitis/herpes/etc virus too.
But here's what i've always been curious about - what they invented a STD that made your penis longer, or one that made your breasts larger (depending on gender). This really could be the wave of the future - certain people becoming sexually appealing due to designer viruses they carry.
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
It would seem that they hijack HIV and turn it into an anti-HIV virus. Though that might make it easier to spead the cure around, one can only wonder if there is the possibility for things to go wrong to create a super virus thats difficult if not impossible to stop...
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".
There've been a few cases of a doctor using the "I've been injected with the cure for <insert fictional disease that patient supposedly has> and the only way for you to get it is to have sex with me" line. This may be the first time that it's true!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Some viruses are indeed enemies of each other. I always thought that the only way to fight aids was to find a virus which didn't harm the human body but was lethal to HIV. Now let's hope there is an easier way to get the new virus inserted in the body and that there isn't any colateral damage
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Unless that virus can stay in your body indefinitely (meaning without your immune system eventually killing it) HIV will still win. It tends to hide in various places in your body like lymph nodes and can strike at almost any time. That's why some people go 10 or 20 years before getting sick as well as why you can reduce your virus count to undetectable with current meds but it will pop back up if you stop taking them.
Okay, so it's ambiguous, but quickly browsing lower paragraphs shows they're scared by how easy it was to develop a virus, with a specific purpose/target to boot. As opposed to being scared because of the inefficiency of multinational research corps or whatever [that's more or less what I assumed at first as well].
Stuff.
That may be true, but I support any technology that makes it easier for slashdoters to get laid.
In all seriousness though, this is very very cool. Anyone interested in the original HIV genome (it's like sourcecode) can find it here.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
But we're talking about people who (usually) already have had unsafe sex with HIV-infected people. And if they figure they're invulnerable to it, why not take advantage of the other infectees' desire for affection?
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"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"
Maybe it's because I'm not medically inclined, but this doesn't scare me at all. (Assuming this reads like "It scares them that they were able to do it so cheaply with so few people")
a.) Lots of research has already been done, it's unlikely that he had to start on square one. I don't think it's fair to assume that the money and time spent by other researchers didn't give this guy an advantage.
b.) How do we know he didn't just have a great inspiration after watching other failures and take a gamble on it? I can't say I've kept up on this, but this is the first time I've heard of anybody trying to use a virus to kill a virus. (I've heard the theory, but I understood that there was concern over what happens to the new virus...)
I don't think it's so shocking, but maybe those feelings are muted by the idea that maybe a lot of people in Africa will be able to look forward to a long healthy life.
"Derp de derp."
Heroin that, by the time it was discovered, was considered as an 'heroic' non-additive substitute for morphine and medication.
Anyone remember the super lethal smallpox virus?
Transmissible gene therapy has some awesome potential, and the fact that such limited resources could pull it off is all the more inredible.
The flip side of this is of course the potential for insanely destructive devices in the hands of anyone with a decent budget and some technical bioengineering skill.
Technological advances are going to drive the price point for this technology down ever further. In 10 years, should we be concerned if $5,000 in supplies and computing equipment allows this same feat to be accomplished?
It's going to start getting very interesting as the decades roll by. The ever increasing and incredible capabilities that these technologies provide are a double edged sword. They will be used for great good, but you can be sure more malicious uses will also be employed...
If I read well, the treatment is based on a tweaked HIV. What if the 'good' virus evolves and become another very offensive one ?
Hey, I'm not kidding. One of the difficulties researchers encounter is the constantly-changing nature of HIV. I don't know if this a very trustable approach.
There's also the problem that this modified virus can itself be propagated autonomously which is a problem, because once its "out there", its out of control in a way. And if its out there uncontroled in may mutate in unexpected ways (stated in the article).
I think the methodology of using virus and modifying the "payload" is a good research direction. But there should be safeguards. For example, it should be possible to add a deficiency or vulnerability in the modified virus so that it could be taken out using normal antibiotics. Therefore making the "runaway" scenario at most a benign one.
if you were treated with this, you'd still be HIV positive. Sort of.
This appears to insert itself into the HIV sequence, and add a gene that supresses other functions of the same sequence. In my mind this is closer to the treatment available for leprosy than an actual cure.
In other words, if this became successful, people treated with it would most likely be safe from acquiring AIDS from their HIV infection, but would still be HIV positive. They should still not have sex with HIV negative people, to reduce the possiblity of re-infection and/or harm.
It's much better than taking drug coctails to stay alive, though. A hell of a lot cheaper, too.
hmmmm?
Actually, current drug treatments can bring HIV levels down to an undetectable amount--however, the virus is somehow still lurking in your body (perhaps in your brain, as antibody producing cells cannot cross the blood brain barrier).
One of the concepts of evolution is that two species cannot live in the same niche, i.e. two versions of HIV cannot coexist at the same time. Due to natural selection, one HIV species will beat the other out. Since HIV's mechanism of spreading is quite dependant on the lysis of white blood cells, I would not expect the winner of this battle to be this new "helpful" HIV
if she had had a y chromosome instead, the hole would have been covered by a sac and that clit lengthened. in fact, as an embryo in the pouch, you had a clitoris yourself. you can't touch the clit directly just as it is painful to rub the "head" of a man if he is not aroused. take some notes, it's all psychological behaviour that is making you want to fuck your SO. Otherwise you are both basically the same with only a few freak mutations that happen to work in your favor.
There are really two avenues of research: one to cure HIV, and one to supress it from turning into AIDS. They both have great upsides - curing HIV would be great for obvious reasons (but we haven't been able to do it yet). Supressing HIV reduces the amount of virus in the body - this helps to prevent the onset of AIDS, but it also greatly reduces the risk of transmission of the virus. On successful drug therapy, the number of copies in the bloodstream is very low (under 40 copies/mL blood by today's standards), while untreated it can be in the millions of copies per mL blood. If there isn't as much virus in the blood, the probablity of infection through all avenues (sexually and otherwise) is greatly reduced. Not enough that you'd want to take your chances, but enough to possibly have an impact on the spread of the disease.
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.
HIV already constantly mutates - if it didn't, nobody would be dying from AIDS. There are all sorts of permutations of the virus out there - that is the one of the biggest challenges for HIV drugs, and the reason for the cocktail (rather than one drug at a time). HIV is pretty good at becoming resistant to drugs - even if a patient took a drug at precisely the right times all of the time, eventually the virus becomes resistant. Once a mutated copy of the virus is in the blood stream, the drug quickly loses it's effect.
The drug cocktail (usually three drugs) helps to prevent this - if a copy of the virus does manage to mutate around one drug, there are two other ones in the blood to destroy it. As long as the patient is complient with treatment (takes all of the drugs and doesn't miss doses), this line of treatment could theoretically last for years, especially with the number of new drugs in the pipeline. Still, triple-drug therapy isn't perfect, and overtime it seems that resistance will still develop (although it takes much longer than single-drug therapy).
Even if the virus were to mutate, it would do so under the same conditions as the anti-virus... drugs can't mutate, but the anti-virus could, and it could conceivably undergo the same permutations as the real virus - in effect, it could respond to these changes in the virus, which is where drugs will always fall short.
Another point is that it is relatively easy to get the genotype/phenotype of HIV in the blood stream, which allows doctors to determine the best drugs to treat the virus. If they are able to make this anti-virus work, it wouldn't be very difficult to simply create several different 'versions' of the anti-virus that could overcome the various common permutations of the virus.
It's also worth pointing out that while there are a lot of drugs that can treat the virus in the blood stream, not all of them can treat it in other areas (such as the lymph nodes or brain stem). If this anti-virus worked in the same way as HIV does, then it would be able to hit the virus everywhere it reproduces, even the hard-to-reach spots like the lymph nodes.
As for 'it will make people more complacent about sex', well, we'll just have to deal with that one. The same could be said for anti-retroviral drugs. It's not right to abandon this or any avenue of treatment because it may make some people less responsible about their sexual habits, especially with something as devistating as HIV/AIDS.
Of course, it's impossible to have any idea what would actually happen over a long period of time... I'm not a doctor, but even doctors find it difficult to estimate how well and for how long treatments will work - so far, most of what we know is through trial and error.
Which option would/should we prefer:
1) The HIV antivirus operates as specified. AIDS is inhibited from occurring, but the HIV virus is still present and may even spread freely now that the risk of AIDS is diminishing.
2) The HIV antivirus is exceptionally lethal. Those that are HIV positive quickly die, but the HIV virus is kept from spreading and may eventually die out.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
Even if this works 100%, isin't one of the reasons HIV is so hard to treat BECAUSE it's extremely mutative and because of this quickly adapts to any form of treatment- Coulden't introducing another variation of HIV into the bloodstream end up 'double-gunning' the test subject, as the 'bad HIV' mutates to be immune to the 'good HIV' and the 'good HIV' mutates to become bad for the 'host'?
Now don't get me wrong- I see a lot of good in using more HIV to counter HIV- because of it's mutative abilities; if the 'good HIV' has been reconfigured to somehow prey on 'bad HIV' it will keep mutating in course to follow the 'bad HIV's mutations so that it will survive. However that said, I'm not sure it will allwase work that way, and only time will tell.
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It's a different environment.
As Ebola only shows up in small African villages (as far as I know) where there isn't exactly a large population or people travelling to other population centers frequently, the short incubation time prevents it from spreading like an epidemic.
However, the theoretical virus on 24 is to be released in highly-populated areas. It would kill a lot of people, and with the high population density and the way people travel in a place such as LA, it would do a lot of damage.
Perhaps they would have intentionally shortened the incubation period to increase the fear caused by the virus, but still minimize the chance of it becoming a global epidemic - after all, the bad guys would want to be able to get away from it and contain the damage to their targetted locations, correct?
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Well, I think that a person with full blown AIDS is screwed, as AIDS pretty much means that your immune system can no longer fight infectious diseases or much of anything. Unless it were the early stages of AIDS, however, as was said by someone else IANADr.
"Do you suppose that's why God lives in the Heavens? Because he lives in fear of His creations?" - Steve Buscemi
Interesting point. In much the same way that humans carry a lot of viral baggage that doesn't harm most of us most of the time, perhaps this "HIV:anti-HIV" pair will become as widespread as some viruses of the herpes family.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
In this case, it isn't the immune system fighting - it's the anti-HIV virus doing the fighting. Although I'm not a doctor, I imagine this could be effective even for those with full blown AIDS, perhaps even moreso because the immune system cannot fight the anti-HIV virus.
I'm by no means an expert, but doesn't the metabolism of insects (such as mosquitos) destroy the HIV virus? Is there anyway we can use that to help develop a cure?
I'm not so sure about virii originating on warez sites. I remember having a middle school science text book that claimed that virii was the plural of virus and this would have been around the early 90s.
It seems like most of the things taught in middle school are either partially or completely wrong.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Its not pea-sized at all, there's more to a clitoris than meets the eye!
Could be.
But they also said that it there's no garauntee that it won't combine itself with HIV and create something magnatudes worse.
They are essentially the same basic virus, just with the active bits changed. A new mutant virus is not just possible, but likely. I would hold off and watch this new treatment very closely... if I had any reason to.
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Well, that explains why width matters more than length... (or so I've heard:)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
well i modde dyou up before i read the artical... BIG MISTAKE
"By using a computer model of what happens to the immune system when it's infected with HIV, Arkin and his colleagues have designed a potential AIDS treatment that would remain with the patient as long as he or she has HIV, meaning it would prevent AIDS from arising even in patients who otherwise would have developed the disease after a decade of latency. They also predict HIV would not become resistant to the virus."
also note "The treatment is made of a gutted HIV virus. The harmful parts of the virus are removed, and in their place the researchers have inserted a DNA cargo that inhibits HIV's ability to kill immune cells. It latches onto the natural HIV and spreads along with it, even from person to person."
lesson: RTFA
Genomes are like bytecodes, in base4 (nucleotides) or base20 (amino acids), depending on whether you're de/coding in the compiler (meiosis) or the interpreter (ribosome). The compiler really is just a dup; the "coding" process is mutational evolution. The really interesting information is a reverse-engineered interpreter. Who cracks the ribosome code will harness the lathe of heaven.
--
make install -not war
Look, I never said that anybody who gets HIV deverves what they get. I'm saying that in EVERY SINGLE case, somebody is to blame even if it isn't the most recent victim. A newborn gets infected by their mother. If somebody up the chain hadn't screwed around the baby would not have been infected.
You're right on one count though. I did forget about drug addicts sharing needles, as this is effectively a blood transfer.
Okay, so now we're up to "Don't share needles. Don't screw around."
Not very compassionate. Are you using this as a way to lobby against HIV/AIDS research? If so its like lobbying against doing research for safer cars because, if there is an auto accident, someone screwed up while driving and should have been driving safer.
If not and you are lobbying for abstinence, fine that is a viewpoint but keep in mind that it goes against millions of years of evolution. It will be much easier to convince the average person to use a condom than to be abstinent. So far there are no firm results that support abstinence education as working.
The current federal sex ed statistics are mostly useless, they went from tracking number of births and proportion of participants having sex to tracking the number of participants that remain in the program, and the number 'who indicate understanding of the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from premarital sexual activity' (see Dept of Health presentation). Not really comparable. Over the last decade California had the largest drop in the nation of teenage pregnancies (now the lowest in the country) with out abstinence only education.
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Reminds me (geek time) of part of the story line in William Gibson's "Virtual Light" (I think it was this series and not the Neuromancer series).
Basically, everyone was made immunse to the destructive form of the HIV by infecting them with a benign form of HIV that happened to be destructive to other forms of the virus.
Add in all the usual pontifcating about sciene immitating art.
"That is not dead which can eternal lie...."
Nimheil
The idea is to create a retrovirus which will replicate in your cells wildly, creating numerous regulatory sites for HIV proteins that ultimately 'suck up' or titrate the HIV proteins out of solution. (This is from memory however, but I believe this is the only mechanism proposed.)
By lowering the number of HIV proteins in solution, you make it more difficult for the HIV to replicate itself wildly and turn into AIDS. The term is 'lowering the setpoint' of HIV becoming AIDS. HIV is still there. It can still turn into AIDS. But the chances of it doing so are less likely, BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE.
In fact, the most interesting part of the paper (to me), was that if the retrovirus vector is too efficient in killing HIV then the therapeutic vector loses its own mechanism of infection (ie. the HIV capsin proteins) because these capsin proteins are no longer being produced.
It's a fantastic idea, but it's not a viable therapy. Yet. Using the same principles, it'll be possible to more directly kill HIV (in the future).
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Actually, HIV is "pretty to look at" - at least according to these guys.
I have their gonorrhea tie (given to me by my grandparents!), and it's pretty cool as well... fun site....
What happened is that we had a mostly-gay disease make a jump into women, which for the first couple of years made women the "fastest growing" segment. This was merely because of the fact that when you start from one case, the first thousand cases represents a 10,000% increase, while a thousand new cases in a population of a million infected is just a 0.1% rate.
The rate of infections leveled off among women in 1990 or so, when the initial take-up into the high-risk category was completed.
Then the CDC, to artificially create a crisis (and thus get funding), went from making HIV infections the big number to AIDS cases the number. And AIDS is defined as having both HIV and a secondary, opportunistic disease.
This was gamed. Every year, new secondary diseases were added to the definition -- with the result there were lots of new AIDS patients each year who, if the definition used a year earlier was applied, didn't have AIDS. For example, vaginal yeast infections got added to the list, which was doubly effective because the infections are common in even healthy women and they don't happen to men. Urinary tract infections were almost as good an addition, given women's higher vulnerability. Boom! Shift the definition, and suddenly a bunch more women have AIDS!
However, even that course has run out -- eventually, Congress got wise, pointed questions were asked, and politically-motivated definition expansions ended.
Then there was the next shift -- we went back to counting HIV infections. But not rates of infections, just raw numbers. And we had modern drug therapies keeping the infected alive, which meant that we had fewer people leaving the class of HIV infected each year, which meant with the rate staying steady, the numbers of infected grew higher. HIV wasn't any more of a problem than it was five years earlier; in fact, the numbers went up only because we were combating it more effectively.
So, we had an early statistical artifact that was entirely predictable and should have been expected; then we had political gamesmanship that artificially inflated numbers; then we had good news repackaged as bad news. But it made headlines every time, causing the superficially informed to believe we had a continually worsening HIV/AIDS problem.
Not to say that HIV/AIDS isn't a real problem. But it's not any worse in the U.S. in 2004 than it was in the U.S. in 1989. It's a stable, contained problem.
Producing a cure would close off that avenue of income.
Now I'm only waiting for Microsoft to develop anti Sasser/WhateverWorm virus that is using this same mechanism. Spread itself around internet and patches whatever machine it finds.
> The heterosexual epidemic never materialized?
Not in the developed world, it didn't. It only materialized in the underdeveloped world. Ever been to Africa, especially South Africa? We're talking about a populace which, while the educated are as intelligent and advanced as anyone, is mostly composed of the uneducated and under-educated who believe superstitions and don't know science. A nontrivial percentage of people there believe that sex with a virgin will cure HIV, which has contributed a bit to South Africa being the rape capital of the world. Early last year one of the big headlines was the gang-rape of *an infant* by adult males who thought it would cure their HIV.
It's a matter of education and availability of condoms at affordable prices, not racism. We are handed 12 years of solid (mostly) schooling, and have condoms available at the corner store for about the cost of lunch money. They are not given such a solid and extended (and largely required) schooling, and are more financially strapped. It isn't racism to point out that HIV is not an epidemic among heterosexuals in the U.S., or most of the rest of the West. You're the one who brought up Africa, not the parent poster, but since you did it must be pointed out that it's a very different world there--there are clear reasons culturally, economically, and otherwise why we have escaped a heterosexual AIDS crisis and they haven't.
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