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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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Although the scientist doing this work stated, "we would like to formally show this before making any claims that would cause unwanted hype" and the "few AIDS research luminaries" mentioned in the article are not willing to comment this early, it looks like there may already be some interest in Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals' OTC stock which closed at 3.67--up a healthy 122.42% today.
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.
but the AIDS virus was a god sent plague upon the morale-less soul sucking evil anti christian gays... surely the doctors who are pursuing these so called aids cures are performing work of the devil and funding should be withdrawn immediately.
+5 sarcasm
(+5 funny? +5 sad? +5 satire, cause you know there are people out there that really think that way, freaks)
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.
let the fucking begin!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
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...
I'm no med student but the article states that: Ok, if this is true, then we've overcome the large part of AIDS (immunodeficiency). We can just boost the hell out of the white blood cell mimicking Ceragenins. Will this stop AIDS? Maybe not, but it will provide the defenses that AIDS rips from its patients. If I recall correctly, it's not the AIDS virus itself that kills a victim but instead another desease/sickness that occurs from a weakened immune system.
What's exciting is that the AIDS virus probably doesn't infect/reproduce when it is being killed by Ceragenins like it does to white blood cells. Thus, they may have something here if their premises hold true.
Googling for "Ceragenins" results in zero hits. Which means this is some magical elixir that is a mistakened cure all. Or perhaps it's something very obscure that no one has thought of until today? We shall see.
My work here is dung.
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?"
Heh, you refuse to comment on this until further results are publsihed... except for this. Soo... starting...
NOW!
"This is considered plagiarism."
I dunno. So the compound destroys HIV in the test tube. AFAIK, this is underwhelming, because the problem with HIV is that it hides out inside cells where blood-borne drugs can't get to it. (I don't even think it's in there as a complete viral particle, probably just the RNA.)
You could hope that if you kept your bloodstream flooded with the drug you could nail each new virus as it emerged, but I seem to recall HIV can go directly from cell to cell, without entering the bloodstream at all.
I think our natural immune system kills off viral infections in substantial part by recognizing which of our cells are infected and killing them. That is, it's not just a question of wiping out the free virus, I think.
Though I wanted to, I will not reply to your comment.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I'd prefer to just mod this "flamebait" but instead, I'll point out that the "Mormon" church donates millions each year to needy people including 3rd world countries. But hey, you keep smokin' whatever it is that lets you ignore reality in favor of your prejudices.
Many a slashdotter can now get laid!
I don't think the fear of contracting an STD was preventing that
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
So just the fact that they've found something that kills AIDS is not particularly interesting.
What's required is to also do tests on cells, then animals, then humans. If they don't immediately keel over, then we can get a tad excited. Until then, it's about as promising a treatment as red fuming nitric acid (a real good AIDS zapper).
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.
Oddly enough, despite what may seem like a breakthrough in HIV research, the word "Ceragenin" brings up ZERO hits in Google. If this was really hot or big, you think it should bring up lots of hits.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ok, so I missed that word. I did RTFA but I'm still skeptical.
Viruses and bacteria are so different to me, rarely a treatment affects both.
CSA, in fact, stands for Cationic Steroid Antimicrobial and almost every piece of research involving them is centered on attacking bacteria.
How come zero hits turn up for Ceragenins when I search for it?
This article didn't include much of the above information and seemed to give a completely different name for CSAs than what they truly are--compound steroids used to primarily combat bacteria.
My work here is dung.
Never say never. I think there are a number of studies that have yet to be done on latently infected cells with integrated HIV. Without fully characterizing the latent cells, we can't really say that there isn't something different about them that can't be exploited for targeting treatments.
If leaders of the field are to be believed, anti-retroviral drug regimens can currently eliminate all infected cells in the body save for these latently infected ones. And if developments arise that allow specific targeting and elimination of the latent cells, boom problem is solved. I'm prophesizing a system of targeted immune activation to draw out the hiding infected cells, and letting existing drugs get rid of em.
I think the problem of replication and infection in the brain is also poorly understood. Personally, I think the extravasation of infected immune cells into the brain is the source of replication, rather than any of the resident cells. The cells in the brain that can host replication are extremely limited (microglia, barely in astrocytes), and there are already promising developments to stop replication with drugs that easily cross the blood brain barrier (minocycline stops hiv replication in microglia, attenuates neuronal apoptosis).
Gene therapy to deliver RNAi targeting HIV mRNAs offers another potential solution to this whole problem. I think the tools and most of the knowledge are out there. We just need to develop them to the point of usability. However, I really have little faith in the utility of the drug outlined in this study. Tons of crap kills HIV in a test tube. Let's see how toxic this drug is and its bioavailability/pharmocokinetic profile.
As for the blood-brain barrier: the barrier is made by what are called "glia cells." Or more specifically, astrocytes, a type of glia cells. The lipid membranes of these cells only allow certain molecules that are lipid soluble (non-polar) to enter the brain barrier. That is why when you add only one acetyl group to morphine, it becomes heroin and can act on the brain simply because it is non-polar enough to pass through the barrier. Most anti-viral drugs can indeed get through this barrier. Even if that were not the case though, HIV is a blood pathogen and circulation in and out of the brain would likely be enough to contact all HIV molecules with the anti-viral medication. How else would today's HIV cocktails work? HIV does NOT camp out and slowly kill neurons. At all. It cannot attack neurons. Only t-cells. When enough of your t-cells are attacked and killed, you get AIDS.
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It's hard to get that excited about an "in vitro" ("in glass") result. Lots of things work in vitro. There's no indication of whether this works in animals. When they can show it working in mice with human immune systems (there are genetically engineered mice with human immune systems, used for this kind of research), they'll have something. This is a long way from an "AIDS cure".
The reason nobody can find the term "ceragenins" in Google is that compounds of this class are called "cationic steroid antibiotics" in the literature. "Ceragenins" is a PR term.
This company also claims that these compounds can be used to treat cancer, macular degeneration, and multiple-antibiotic resistant infections. They also can be used for skin cream for dry, itchy skin. There's an proposed antiterrorism application, to make smallpox vaccination safer.
However, there are no claims that these compounds improve gas mileage.
Ticker symbol: CGXP.OB. Up 122% today on this press release.
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