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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/
Where can I get signed up to be "infected" and singlehandedly propagate the cure to the world's population?
--Kevin
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.
Who's going to develop a virus to kill the virus that kills the HIV virus?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS.
Did they USE $200,000 and a grad student, or did they EXPEND $200,000 and a grad student? An important distinction, especially from the grad student's perspective.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
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.
Since no animal testing was mentioned, I would like to extend my condolences to the grad student's family. It may seem like a great sacrifice, but just think of all the data gathered from the autopsy.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Ebola is spread as easily as the common cold. What sort of properties would an Ebola/rhinovirus combination have that you're afraid of?
The reason Ebola doesn't spread very far is because it has a short incubation period, and kills very quickly. The infected don't have much of a chance to transmit it outside of the local populace---an outbreak can be identified and contained.
Contrast this with HIV, which has a tremendous incubation period, meaning that even though it's very difficult to transmit, it's spread terribly.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
'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!)
What works in a dish of cells is often an entirely different story in an entire organism. It will be exciting when their virus manages to, say, keep an SIV-infected monkey alive for five years post-infection.
Seven years ago, a custom rhabdovirus (rabies) for selectively killing HIV-infected cells had my biotechnolgy professor all excited, but nobody's heard from them for a while since it didn't work in whole organisms.
(Why yes, I _am_ a molecular biologist....)
"I never really used Joe either but a stupid editor is a stupid editor." -D. Reed.
I am a bio major....
HIV is a double stranded DNA virus. Very different and it uses the cells own DNA polimerase to replicate itself and create teh proteins for the new virus. Very different.
If you were a bio major, you would know that HIV is a retrovirus, which carries its genome in RNA, and uses reverse transcriptase to copy itself into DNA.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
WRONG! Actually, everyone should know that HIV is a retrovirus. It has a single stranded RNA genome which is replicated through a double stranded DNA intermediate. At this point, the viral DNA is integrated into the host cell's genome. Kiss my phd.
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.
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.
It's GNU/HIV
Let's make a difference
Just a minor correction to my own post. HIV packages two positive-strand RNA molecules (positive-strand diploid, as pointed out by someone else), not negative strand. That'll teach me to post quickly while heating up dinner.
Norman Spinrad's 1995 novella, Journal of the Plague Years, describes this very thing. I wonder if the researchers were inspired by it?
I always thought Unbelievably Cynical would be a +1
Why not get the real ultimate power?
Except that there is no basis for virii being the plural of virus in Latin whatsoever. The plural of murus (wall) is muri. The plural of filius (son) is filii. Apparently someone thought virus should have a plural ending in -ii because they saw the plural of filius and other second declension nouns ending in -ius and thought that all nouns ending in -us ended in -ii.
The confusion doesn't end there though. There is no example of the word virus being pluralized in any classical works. This wouldn't be a problem except that virus is an irregular noun. It's a neuter noun that is declined like a masculine second declension noun (except the accusative case which is also virus). In Latin (and Greek as well) neuter nouns have plurals that end in -a. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. This is one of the most reliable rules in Latin (and in Latin most rules have very few exceptions in the first place). As such viri can't be the plural of virus either.
Then there are some people who upon hearing that virus is neuter mistake it for a third declension neuter noun and say that the plural of virus should be virora just as the plural of corpus is corpora. However, this cannot be the case since virus is known to have the genitive singular form viri and if it were a third declension noun it would have the form viroris.
Then there are other people who say that virus is a fourth declension noun but this doesn't make much sense since the genitive form doesn't match what would be expected for a fourth declension noun and as for as I know all fourth declension neuter nouns end in -u and not -us.
My best guess is that the plural of virus would be virus since this follows the pattern of other second declension neuter nouns with gender confusion issues. However, it's probably best to avoid all of this confusion and just pluralize it as viruses.
And now you know. And knowing is half the battle.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
I work in the Arkin group, and Leor is a friend of mine.
Here is the reference and the PDF of the actual article that the research featured in the Wired report is based off of:
PDF: http://tinyurl.com/yu5ur
Leor S. Weinberger, David V. Schaffer, Adam P. Arkin. "Theoretical Design of a Gene Therapy To Prevent AIDS but Not Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection". 2003. Journal of Virology. 77(18). 10028-10036.
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~taltman
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.Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
how long until spammers steal the data from your honorable study for marketing purposes?
Soon I'll find messages in my inbox with the subject:
Tap in2 half a million miles of surplus p.u.s.s.y with our product!
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7