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Possible Breakthrough for AIDS Cure
kryonD writes "Researchers believe they have found a new compound that could finally kill the HIV/AIDS virus, not just slow it down as current treatments do. While most of the community is still hesitant to comment on this until it passes peer review, initial results show that their method attacks and kills ALL variations of the virus. A fast track through the FDA could have one of the world's leading problems licked in less than a decade."
There is a history of announcing big breakthroughs in science here in Utah by going to the press before appropriate peer review has taken place (Cold Fusion anyone?). Don't get me wrong, I would love to see this come through, but until it passes the peer review test, as a scientist, I will withhold my enthusiasm.
In fact, any time I hear something potentially huge being hyped in the mainstream press before I hear about it in scientific journals, my eyebrows tend to rise a bit and I tend to be perhaps even more skeptical.
"We have some preliminary but very exciting results [but] we would like to formally show this before making any claims that would cause unwanted hype."
Uh...... yeah. That is why I am reading about it in the Salt Lake Tribune before hearing about it in Science or Nature?
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This substance is a mimic of a current human body chemical, and attacks one hell of a lot more than just HIV- my guess is it will end one of two ways. It will either strip the body of everything including our normal colonies of beneficial bacteria and yeasts, and thus be too dangerous to use. Or it won't work for some mutation, and we'll still have a million or so HIV patients after it's in widespread use.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
As nice as it is to think that we have an AIDS cure, and that we don't have to worry about it anymore. But I think that rushing it through a FDA approval, without exploring its full consequences could be a little dangerous. If this drug was passed, and everybody who took it got rid of their AIDS, but developed some other condition which killed them in a year, then we'd all look a little stupid, and the drug company would probably be under a lot of scrutiny.
Another thing though, is this drug patented, or will this be cheaply available for everyone who needs it, especially AIDS ravaged countried in Africa.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Although so far limited to early test tube studies, CSA-54, one of a family of compounds called Ceragenins (or CSAs), mimics the disease-fighting characteristics of anti-microbial and anti-viral agents produced naturally by a healthy human immune system.
While the tests are repeatable, there's a long distance between the test tube and human trials.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Forgive me for saying this, but how much of this is trumped up by the scientist vs. the journalist? The researchers stated "we would like to formally show this before making any claims that would cause unwanted hype", yet the journalist went on and hyped it up.
The headline could've easily read:
"Professor makes steps in war against HIV/AIDS"
"New lead in fight against HIV/AIDS"
Or something along those lines.
I'm actually a BYU student and I'd love to see a terrible disease like HIV/AIDS destroyed as much as the next man - I've met many people suffering from this disease in Latin America and it's horrible to see. I just think the journalist decided to soup up the story by taking what are very preliminary results and making a huge deal of them.
Then again, I do have my fingers crossed...
Repost this after they've shown some actual data, gotten it published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, and had independent investigators replicate it. There isn't a single hit for this "family" of compounds on PubMed, and the compound is named after a frikkin biotech company, so color me extremely skeptical - of both data and motives.
This is why normal people get fed up with science. Their exposure to science is through media stories, PR bullshit like this, which says "Huzzah! Cure for X found!" Later on, we find out that the data is too weak to pass peer-review, that the new compound is toxic, that it only weakly suppresses X in animal models, and that X is not yet, in fact, cured. The real scientists around the world keep at their benchwork, with barely a glance up, steadily and (to the public) inconspicuously advancing our fundamantal understanding of X. But five years later, Mr. Normal Person hears another story like this one and says to himself "Didn't they cure X years ago? What are those ivory-tower leeches spending my $30 billion a year on, anyway?"
I agree. I'm really, really tired of hearing about stuff like that - stuff that has basically no chance of ever developing into anything meaningful. And this goes for the technology stuff, not just the science. Even more tired than I am of seeing dupes. Call me back when someone has developed a treatment for AIDs that has actually been tested on humans and works.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
This reminds me of something my biology teacher told me in high school:
HIV is very easy to kill. Anyone with a bottle of Clorox has a powerful tool for killing all variants of HIV.
The hard part is killing it without killing or damaging other tissues.
Unless HIV works differently from other viruses, it does eventually kill the infected cell it used to replicate itself.
Why? Because virus replication dumps all the copies *inside* the cell walls. Eventually, the cell gets as full as it can be and pops - releasing all the newly-formed copies. The cell at that point is damaged beyond recovery and dies.
There is nothing to reverse once the infected cells have cycled. The real problem is getting *all* copies of the virus, since it can hide dormant in other types of tissue.
*I am not a doctor, but I play one on dates.*
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
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Yes, I'm sure if it was in the hands of Pfizer they would just give it away for free.
We are all just people.
Whether we want to admit it or not, the spectre of a fatal, wasting illness does influence sexual behavior.
- term illness, risky behavior rose.
During the late '80s and early '90s, when their friends and partners were dying long, drawn-out, horrible deaths, unsafe sex practices declined rapidly in the gay male population.
With the advent of "maintenance drugs" that make living with HIV somewhat akin to living with diabetes or another chronic, life-impacting-but-usually-not-fatal-in-the-short
Once HIV is cured, expect sexually risky behavior to go up, possibly approaching its pre-1983 levels. If this happens, you will see a corrosponding rise in Herpes and other incurable STDs, along with a rise in the attending public health costs.
Yes, we should be working to cure HIV and for that matter Herpes and other diseases. However, we should continue to educate our youth that the only sure-fire prevention of getting and STD or worse, giving it to someone you love, is abstenance, and where that is not possible, the 2nd-best way is to use some combination of barrier and/or chemical to block STD transmission.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Muslims burn embassies and demand death over a comic but bashing Christians is what's fashionable here? Wait till Muslims get a hold of your fag asses, you won't laugh as they murder you in public for your sins.
...but that doesn't stop it (or radiation, rather) from being the most powerful tool we have in fighting cancer.
It doesn't matter if the AIDS drug is harmful. Like the radiation therapy that we treat cancer with, it just has to be less harmful than the disease it treats.
And existing HIV drugs are already pretty harmful, even though they just contain rather than cure the disease. They're used anyway, because despite the negative effects they're vastly preferable to an uncontained case of AIDS.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I would like to point out 1) that it's not just BYU working on this. The person whose results are actually cited in the study is actually Dr. Derya Unutmaz, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. 2) it's being supported by Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is based in Denver. It's probably a long shot, and the company knows it. But it's real research the way it's normally done in this field. 3) it's not the professors hyping the results so much as it is the journalists. As usual. All those saying there's a long way to go are right, and the researchers who did the work would whole-heartedly agree. 4) BYU has and continues to produce research that is published in peer reviewed journals. Just because part of it was done at BYU doesn't make it wrong; BYU has done many things that are actually right. Saying or implying anything different is simply religious bigotry. 5) Oh, and many of you would be surprised to visit the Biology department at BYU. They believe in evolution there. When I went home for Christmas my sister bad-mouthed creationism because, after taking botany at BYU, she knew they didn't have a leg to stand on. (Stories about individual Mormons, even prominent ones, who might have disagreed will be promptly ignored. I probably have seen, heard, and read more of it than you have.)
The truth is, drug patents are the best case to be made in favor of patents. The only problem is that even that example provides a weak case.
I think I'll go surfing on dubious websites for a few hours without a virus scanner or a firewall, because I don't really believe that computer viruses exist. You can't prove that I infected other users from my address book. It could be something totally random that caused their hard drive bits to flip. This whole computer virus thing is just a conspiracy designed to sell useless software and spread fear.
In two years, I will graduate from medical school and treat, without predjudice, patients who might believe as you do. If you should become infected with HIV and acquire AIDS, but refuse treatment, I'll wish you well. But if you should have a change of heart, then I will use my conspiracy-driven science to help you to the best of my ability.
In response: people have a right to do what they want so long as they do not exercise force against others. This right is absolute. If the man wants not to save the child, we may call him a depraved individual with a set of values far outside the set of those which sane human beings may hold, we may. We may not however initiate the use of force against him by imprisoning him for no action. The same is true in the case of medication. If you contractually ablige yourself to save another's life, you must; if you don't, you are under no obligation to do so. Even if a law is passed allowing theft (of a drug in this case) it is still wrong. Laws != ethics.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
More precisely, we want to establish a system whereby people will put the effort and money into the research and development in the first place. This doesn't necessarily have to be exclusive control, but you want the thought to be in people's heads that there is good money to be made in developing a cure for AIDS. Exclusive control (a.k.a "intellectual property") is probably the easiest way to do this (from an administrative/policy perspective) but it is certainly not the only way.
Sometimes, exclusive control turns out to have a significantly negative impact (cf. software patents, and this discussion). Other times, it turns out to be beneficial. You really have to look at the particulars of the situation to determine what's "right" in any given case.
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I think you are attacking the straw-slashdotter. If the science is real and valid I don't care who came up with it. It looks like the very few comments bashing LDS are being modded into oblivion. And dude, don't have a persecution complex. Just because one jackass says something totally stupid doesn't mean the whole of slashdot is out to bash your faith. Personally, I think all the faiths are basically nonsense. But you can believe whatever you want, its none of my business. All a mormon or an atheist or a satan worshipper needs to do to have their science respect is produce good results that can be reproduced. Beyond that its totally irrelevant. I suspect most actual scientists would agree with me.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
I support allowing private corporations, like Google to fund research and make generic drugs. I think it's better for the markets if the private sector handles it, also humanitarian work is not something governments are good at. Governments are not designed for this job, private corporations are.
Last I looked, the AIDS toll in Africa stood at 30 million, which is more people than live in my entire country -- and more than another 25 million have the disease and know that they're going to die because of it. In Africa alone.
The figures for 'way back in 2000 were 10,000 a day, 4,000 of those from AIDS. Last year, there were over 3 million deaths and nearly 5 million new infections. That would wipe out my entire state in five months, eight through AIDS alone, and AIDS alone would do in the entire country in about eight years.
True, there are those other diseases around -- curable ones too -- but don't underestimate the damage which AIDS does. There are 12 million AIDS orphans alive as I type, for example.
Amongst other things, a common urban myth in Africa is that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS... so you get AIDS-infected men raping girls who are so young that they have to be virgins. Nice.
It's also largely curable by the same education which would reduce AIDS and practically eliminate tuberculosis and malaria. In fact, the basic directives for achieving this are something like 4500 years old. Nevertheless, a magic bullet for AIDS would be a more than welcome assistant. My only real reservations center around what else it kills besides AIDS.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing