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The Cure for Cancer Might be: HIV
RGautier writes "Wired News has published that Scientists have successfully modified the AIDS-causing HIV in such a way that it can attack metasticized melanoma (cancer cells). The impact of genetic research on cancer research is in and of itself amazing. To mix this with the strategy of using one strong enemy against another is brilliance! Research will continue, obviously, but they are already reporting success on living creatures." Just think: between HIV and carrots we'll be all set.
The bad news is you have cancer. The good news is you have HIV!
I think I'd go with the carrots. I dunno, maybe I'm just weird.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
The microscopic version of Alien Vs. Predator
You assume it isn't already. Remember what White Bloodcells do? Along with anti-biotics and vacines? All this is doing is adding in another weapon to the arsenal.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
And the cure for HIV is Heart Disease!
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
So when this hits the market, will HIV be cheaper in Canada than the US?
www.kiwilyrics.com - a wiki for lyrics
Maybe HIV-Lite? Or I Can't Believe It's Not HIV!
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
Totally offtopic, but your joke made me think of another I heard somewhere.
A guy goes to the doctor about a problem he's having. After a thorough examination, the doctor says to the patient, "I have good news and I have bad news."
"Well doc, let me hear the good news first.", says the patient.
To which the doctor responds, "Well, the good news is, we're going to name a disease after you!"
Do we really want to turn our bodies into a battlefield for germ warfare?
Yes. You better believe it.
After seeing my mother die from cancer I would give anything to make sure no one else would ever have to go through what me and my sister did.
In short, hell yeah. Bring it on.
Gene therapy use lentivirus-based (HIV) vectors for quite some time now; it's nothing new really; a marketing team found the 'Cure Cancer with HIV!' twist interesting I guess.
When pseudotyped with the right envelope, these virus can infect efficiently any type of cell. They can also transduce non-dividing cells, which is usefull. They lack almost every gene of HIV; they retain certain structures which allow packaging of the genome in the virus and the viral promoter, but that's about it. Viruses are packaged in special cell lines containing the viral components on plasmids most of the time, and preparations are tested for recombinants. Its the best technology out there, but its nothing new, really.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
I don't really think it would make sense to downplay any involvement with HIV. Lets say they decide to call it something else and at a later point in time it's "revealed" that people are being strategically infected with HIV... even in a reduced state... don't you think people would be outraged that this information was withheld? I think the natural reaction from most of the public (through ignorance, of course) would be "why would they keep it from us... is there something they didn't want us to know?"
Best to be as open as possible right from the start to avoid any misconceptions. (Or media backlash.)
I prefer cancer cures smoking.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
chemotherapy - is just poison. it works because the cancer cells absorb the poison much quicker than normal cells.
radiation therapy - again, radiation by itself is bad.
most over the counter acne treatments - are just some form or acid that kills the bacteria on the skin
As for reengineering a virus to take on something else, while facinating, its hardly a new idea. If you are interested in this sort of thing and haven't read Orson Scott Card's Xenocide (part of the Ender Series), you might check it out.
Oh, great. If the future of medicine means that cures will be spread via sexual contact, I'm a dead man for sure!
And the cure for Heart Disease is exercise, which means that we're all doomed.
The summary of the article (and many of the comments) would have you believe this is a potential "cure for cancer".
Melanoma is a subset of the set of all cancers - specifically, it is a form of skin cancer - more specifically, it is a cancer formed from the skin cells that give skin its pigmentation.
Melanoma is NOT *all cancers* - thus even if this modified virus will kill 100% of all melanomas and have 0% harmful side-effects this does NOT make it a "cure for cancer" - merely a "cure for a type of cancer".
The will need to generalize this virus to attack ALL cancerous cells, and NOT to attack any other cells.
Now, if you can work out how a virus can tell the difference between a cancerous cell and a normal but rapidly reproducing cell, you have a Nobel prize awaiting.
www.eFax.com are spammers
80% of the virus has been completely removed and it is just now a carrier. Besides it has got a sindbis cloak that affect only insects and birds, so I believe that the person vaccinated wouldn't contract HIV. Ofcourse there are chances of mutations but when the virus is so weak, its like 0.001%.
And the cure for Heart Disease is exercise, which means that we're all doomed.
Oh really? Don't geeks have Dance Dance Revolution?
Using a virus as a vector refers to inserting a payload into the viral sequence (the desired DNA or RNA), which then gets inserted into the cell's genetic sequence as the virus inserts itself.
So basically I think there's quite a confusion here. I mean, it sounds like we're using one enemy to fight another, but if we can figure out how to get HIV to fight cancer, this new HIV won't go out there and suddenly turn regular HIV into good HIV that kills cancer. In fact, I don't know if it's such a good idea to use one enemy to fight another besides the fact that it sounds ironic. I would've thought that HIV would be one of the worst candidates with its fast mutational rate and ability to attack T-cells making it extremely dangerous. Obviously though, there must be some properties of HIV that make it a good vector in this case.
Working with HIV is actually a lot less dangerous than a lot of other infectious agents. HIV is fairly hard to contract, compared to airborne or contact-transmitted diseases. For example, it dies pretty quickly when exposed to plain old air. It's only HIV's incurability and eventual fatality that makes it so hazardous.
Memory tells me that nurses dealing with high-risk patients are prescribed AZT in order to prevent infection. Can anyone confirm my memory?
That seems pretty unlikely, because AZT is pretty damn toxic. You wouldn't want to take it just as a precaution. It is true that health care workers who've been exposed (e.g. needle prick from an HIV patient) go on a short-term drug cocktail intended to weaken the virus enough for their immune systems to handle it before it gains a foothold.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
While this may be good for curing cancer, I would fear if this tech got in the wrong hands:
"Scientists could customize the system to target any protein on the surface of a cell"
Target the protiens on a group of humans, Kurdish, Jewish, Korean, whatever. Many groups of humans have some genes that are particular to their genetic heritage. Target those geenes to make something worse, instant selective genocide.
-nB
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Good news, we have a cure for your cancer.
Bad news, Bruno here is going to administer it.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
without the malware
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Not exactly HIV, but some European scientists, particularly in the eastern block have been promoting the use of "phages", or general viruses for all kinds of things like killing bacteria and cancer. This idea was somewhat popular before the distillation of antibiotics in the 1930s, then retreated to the backwaters. Its been reviving as more bacteria develop resistance to all of the antibiotics.
HIV Reduced Media Edition?
Somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting.
Things will be reasonably quiet until a few outcast terrorist HIV strands decide to hijack an errant blood clot and crash it into the aortic valve.
Following that, security will start "screening" the blood so finely that the backlog of blood waiting to enter the heart causes our blood pressure to skyrocket, causing us to all die early of heart attacks.
But they'll tell us it's in our best interests, and we'll go along with it anyway.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
...is that the cure for cancer is sexually transmitted!*
Sure as hell beats chemo!
*Of coarse I didn't RTFA.
Well, that may be true for the dozens of pharmaceutical companies that made polio-reducing drugs, but Lederle, the company which marketed the (oral) polio vaccine made KILLING by selling 3 or 4 doses to all 6 billion people on the planet!
Same thing for an HIV cure/vaccine. Dozens of companies would no longer have a source of income, but the ONE company that creates (and patents) the vaccine will guarentee to sell 50 billion units over the next 40 years (assuming, like most vaccines, that it takes a few doses and booster shots to achieve the desired effect).
Plus, as a medical student, I happen to know for a FACT that people in my school are working on HIV vaccines. "They" aren't preventing this type of research.
That's what I thought, when I was working on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance ( NMR ) which was changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging ( MRI ) because too many people were afraid of the word nuclear.
.... and where the backdoor has not been exposed to a malicious worm.