Crocodile's Immune System Kills HIV

ASEville writes "In an ongoing effort to stop the spread of HIV, scientists in Australia have discovered that crocodiles can fight off HIV and kill the virus. This is a major boon to medicine because the crocodile serum can also fight things that are penicillin resistant such as staphylococcus aureus."

Comments

Crocodile Spam

[XNormal]

Spammers are already promoting a product called "The Antidote" supposedly produced from crocodile blood. With these news I think it will get worse.

Here is the FDA's warning.

The worst thing about it is to realize that some desperate people are actually falling for this scam.

While crocodile blood may not pan out

[multiplexo]

there was a discovery recently that Valproic acid, a commonly used anti-convulsant drug can cause cells that are infected with dormant HIV to express the virus, which then alerts the immune system which then kills the cells. If this works out it will be a major advance as one of the problems with HIV now is that it can go dormant for long periods of time, especially with the new HIV drugs that are available and then flare up again. If you force the virus to express itself the immune system kills the cells it has infected. There is a possibility with this treatment that the body could be cleansed of HIV. If this works out there will still be the hard work of developing therapies that can be afforded in the third world, but it's a promising start.

Re:not what it's cracked up to be

[ultranova]

The human immune system is fully capable of killing HIV. However (dumbed down enough for Reuters readers) HIV infects T4 Lymphocytes, so killing the virus means killing your own immune system, and you die of obscure diseases.

I might be wrong here, but I was under the impression that the human immunity system cannot kill HIV - otherwise it would simply kill it before it destroys all the T-cells, after which the bone marrow would produce new ones to replenish the supply.

Human immunity system uses a kind of "smart bomb" tactic - it has marker cells, which release chemicals that stick to foreign objects (like viruses or bacteria), and devourer cells that will attack anything that is so marked. This system allows the immunity system to fight effectively without causing too much damage to the host body it is defending. Unfortunately, the marker chemicals need to be custom-tailored for any particular intruder, and this creates a lag between a marker cell noticing a foreign object and devourer cells destroying it (which is why you get sick, get better and then won't get the same sickness for a while - it takes a while to get enough marker chemicals to your bloodstream to mount an effective defense, but once it's there, it stays there at least a while).

Unfortunately, this doesn't work well against HIV viruses, because they mutate their outer shells at such rabid pace that by the time the immunity system is geared to fight one generation, the next generation is already immune to it. HIV is a bit like a criminal that keeps changing disguises constantly - by the time the police force gets wanted posters of him in the latest disguise, he has already switched to a new one.

An effective HIV medicine would not neccessarily need to kill HIV outright, it would just need to be able to stick to any HIV mutation and look like the marker chemical on the outside.

Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist, virologist or a white blood cell, and therefore don't have any first-hand knowledge of human immunity system. All the claims in this post are my own and do not reflect the official position of my immunity system. This means that I could be completely wrong.

Regarding Peter Deusberg

[PsiPsiStar]

I've read a fair bit of Peter Deusberg's theories.

To start off with, he's not a nutcase. He's done some important work with oncogenic viruses, and was the recipient of an outstanding investigator grant.

This grant was revoked because of purely political reasons, which is blatantly unethical.

My genetics professor for my senior year in college (2000) confirmed this when I talked to him about Deusberg, saying that Deusberg had been treated unfairly.

Of course, neither I nor my college professor agree with Deusberg's hypothesis, but the criticism of HIV research done by Deusberg and others has suffered a lot of political suppresion, particularly when HIV was first being discovered and people were in panic mode. Deusberg has not been treated fairly, and the political suppresion has had the effect that unjust censorship often does. If you want shoddy science, frankly, Fauci's early HIV research contains more than enough of it to go around. And the scanning electron microscope pictures of HIV attacking CD4 cells deserved to be questioned, since SEM photos are easily biased (take 100 photos and pick the one you want.)

AZT was approved for HIV treatment quicker than almost any drug in FDA history because it was rushed through. There's still no valid scientific study that I'm aware of that proves AZT extends lifespan, and the Concord Study was horribly flawed, with people in the experimental group sharing their medication with those in the control group to try and "help" them - a criticism of Deusberg's which is relevant to the current debate. As of 3-4 years ago, AZT was still a component in antiviral cocktails with scientists unwilling to do a controlled study for "ethical reasons" comparing it to the tuskeege institute study, etc. ( not sure about presently)

AZT is a highly toxic DNA chain terminator and was used some time ago as chemotherapy against cancer. Ironically, it's capable of simulating the effects of AIDS (i.e. immune suppression.) If you take AZT, you will get chemotheraputically induced immune suppression that mimics AIDS.

Further, almost none of the "AIDS" cases in Africa (possibly excluding S. Africa) are confirmed via western methods - i.e. either an ELISA test or PCR. If you have a disease associated with immune suppresion, you're assumed to have HIV. Starvation combined with other stressors can also cause immune suppression.

The grandparent poster was correct in that HIV almost never infects a person by itself - there's almost always some other co-infection, in part because HIV is such a weak virus. Deusberg's claim was that HIV was a marker virus, which remains an accurate description even if HIV does cause AIDS. HIV is almost always an indicator of other infections. Even people who have been subjected to HIV contaminated needlesticks are unlikely to actually get HIV. HIV is often an opportunistic infection itself, that takes advantage of a strained immune system or a break in the body's defenses.

As for this article, it seems a bit overblown to me. Scientists have been searching for an animal model for HIV for a while. I haven't kept up in the research recently, so what I'm saying is about 3 years behind the times or so, but frankly I'd be more impressed if human HIV was found to replicate inside crocodiles and cause illness rather than the opposite. There are plenty of animals which are not harmed by the HIV virus and the lack of effective animal models was a longtime problem in HIV research. Nothing new here.

I'm not so interested in crocodile antibodies, which I doubt would help humans. But if crocs have an interferon-like component to their blood, perhaps that could be useful.

Money & AIDs

[sampson7]

I have always hoped that should a real cure for AIDs be developed that the United States government would sieze the intellectual property and put it into the public domain.

Of course, any siezure of property has to be (1) in the public interest, and (2) fairly compensated. I know I'd happily support a politician who advocated such an action, regardless of how much money it might cost.

The other interesting scenario would be an ultra-rich executive or even a company who wanted to secure their place in history. Could a private individual purchase the rights to such a thing? Would a company think the forgone profits were worth the enormous PR boost? Wishful thinking perhaps.

What's the alternative? Have the same pharmacuitical industry complex distribute the drug? I mean we have drugs that cure malaria and all sorts of other things, and we still can't/won't get it to the people who need it. I'm not a naive bleeding heart -- I know the distribution and other problems in Africa (in particular), but we have to at least try, right?