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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
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...
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.
"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."
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 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?
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.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
1) They're not grad students. They're both assistant professors at UC Berkeley. (Odd though that they don't refer to them as Doctors.) Do you really think grad students have $200K to throw around on their own experiments?
2) They chose to publicly credit a grad student (Leor Weinberger) with contributing to this particular piece of work. But leave it to Wired's "professional" journalist to write ambiguously on the facts of a story.
3) It is *not* a cure to HIV/AIDS. Its merely a engineered component which would be a necessary step towards a potential cure for HIV using "synthetic" biology. (Apparently, "gene therapy" is an unpopular term nowadays.) Their theory is that a bioengineered HIV virus would be able displace the deadly strains of HIV and thus reduce AIDS deaths. Adam does a lot of computer modelling in his research to help demonstrate his theories (which to me is also a notable aspect of this story...)
So, to conclude this part, you did not RTFA, heavyweights with hundreds of millions of dollars are able to do this, grad students have not yet demonstrated an ability to do this (although much like an a-bomb or bio-weapons, its probably in their reach), all the conclusions you reached from your presumptions are probably incorrect, and most important, there isn't a cure for AIDS just over the horizon.
I really wish they had published papers available online specific to this research. ( Google let me down... :( ) I suspect the Wired writer was incorrect as describing the engineered HIV virus as "latching" onto the real ones. More likely, its engineering the "vaccinating" HIV virus to be non-deadly and outcompete deadly HIV strains to infect a host (but IANAB). Don't suppose any graduate biology/chemistry students could help dig up some links?
What I did find from Google was a useful blurb about Adam and his work
.There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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.
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.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
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
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....