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'Virus Sponge' Could Improve Flu Treatments, Diabetes Care, Vaccine Development
University of Maryland researchers have announced a new "virus sponge" that could aid in the treatment of, among other things, avian flu. The sponge woks similar to kidney dialysis, filtering the harmful virus from the blood. "The virus sponge is based on a technology called molecular imprinting. In molecular imprinting, researchers stamp a molecule's shape into a substance (in this case, a hydrogel--a sponge-like material). When the specific molecule filters through the hydrogel, it fits in the imprint hole and is trapped."
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I honestly have no idea how this is even a practical technique, much less a breakthrough. Rather than this dodgy "aerogel" technique, you could use the molecules that nature has used for millenia : antibodies. All you need is an antibody against an epitope of the virus (a unique molecular pattern somewhere on it's surface), and then you bind the antibodies to a medium. Or, there's a way to generate the membrane bound antibodies present in B cells, and to adhere those to a surface. In any case, such a "filter" has existed for years, though as far as I know, this technique hasn't been used to filter the blood of a living patient.
Then again, neither have these researchers : they are just claiming it is practical.
...it's only a short-term solution. It's great if the patient is to be kept isolated, away from any other source of new infection (after the 'sponge' is removed). The sponge works to remove the active contaminant from the patient's bloodstream - it does not, however, allow the patient to build up an autoimmune response to the target contaminant. Neat idea, tho.
Informatus Technologicus
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I would be very sceptical about the proposed use in diabetes.
FTA: "Applying the technology to a drug or food additive could contribute to the dietary freedom of those who suffer from type II diabetes," Kofinas said.
It's not as simple. Diabetes is not just about glucose intake, more about energy intake. So filtering out glucose is equivalent to eating "diabetic" sugar free food. Helps, but is far from a cure and in some cases actually makes the patient's sugar higher (since they tend to have higher intake of this "sugar-free" food).
It would be great to see something like this developed to a usable stage, but I see it more useful as purifying/separating technique rather than a cure. Let's wait and see where this goes. :)
For instance, why not use it to filter out cholesterol or arterial plaque? Go in to the clinic once a month and clean out the pipes. Or an ingestible version that binds with saturated or trans-fats? Granted, there's problems with having too much undigested crap (anal seepage, anyone?), but a lot of that is because current fat blockers use a shot-gun approach that knocks out good and bad fats. If you can just bind the trans or saturated fats and let the unsaturated ones in, that could be an amazing boost to the health of all Slashdotters - pepperoni pizza suddenly becomes a health food...
There are a number of cancers which leave free-floating cancerous clumps of cells in the bloodstream. Patients with such cancers often get extra chemotherapy injected into the spine to stop it reaching there. A free-floating cancer clump would seem to be easier to filter with this sort of sponge than an individual virus.
Would it make more sense for these folks to use the product on a market that actually exists right now, so that they can refine and develop the idea further for viruses who have not yet evolved to be transmissible between humans and therefore whose lethal form is as yet unknowable?
(It sounds a great idea, but great ideas need to be researched thoroughly, which isn't cheap. Free-floating cancers could be a potential source of revenue between now and when it's needed for a viral epidemic.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
this could also be made to filter essential nutrients. A notable use would be to dust it over a crop of opium plants maybe with the ability of filtering the active ingredients. It would be unseen and undetectable until it hits market making the product worthless.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Selectivity is most important. It's great that this gel can 'capture' virus proteins, but does it bind them more tightly than other proteins? This could be very problematic if it removes native proteins in the human serum. Many proteins look alike structurally at low resolution -- nm resolutions. If this system doesn't discriminate based on other factors like electrostatics, then this couldn't possibly be an effective filter.
The next problem is accessibility. I'm assuming that this gel only traps proteins outside of cells. I'm not a virologist (I'm structural biologist & biophysical chemist), but it seems to me that if a virus has integrated itself into your genome or populated most of your cells, you're screwed.
Viruses live in cells. They can move from one cell to the adjacent next cell when the first infected cell lyses. Furthermore, even if a virus ends up in blood, would you catch it with a filter at a central point, or would the virus already have infected another cell by then before reaching the filter.
Blood doesn't like to be filtered. Damage to blood by hemodialysis is well known (which is why you everyone should be a donors, especially as the chance that you will actually be a donor is minuscule).
That is not to say that the technique cannot have any use, but in the area of blood filtration, I don't think so. Even for treating donated blood it may not be as useful as one might think, because the virus (if not in a blood cell), may be attached to a (red) blood cell.
Bert
I would think it very amusing if either anyone on the research team, or human test subjects had a first name of "Robert".
"This is the best day ever!" - Stephen Hillenberg
No wonder that spongebob is never ill.
Like procmail or grep for the body.
Just don't mess up that regular expression or you might filter out something good.
I think that a method to remove alcohol from the bloodstream the moment you walk out the door of the pub would be a killer app, except that then all of a sudden that gorgeous girl at your side will just become a common broad and that just might ruin the rest of the night...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
cue the obvious virus-trapping overlords joke.
There does appear to be electrostatic and shape interactions. Functional groups involved in binding do not get crosslinked, so there is both shape and some electrostatic specificity. The binding concept does seem similar to antibodies. Polymers are easy to create on the scale of pounds to tons very cheaply however. And polymers last a long time by not being biodegradable. The differences do seem to be in the level of price and practicality. They did acheive a significant level of specificity using the technique, which is why the results are important.
Besides, it's not like aptamers aren't useful even though they function similarily to antibodies.
I was thinking more like: virus sponge = woman who goes down on anything. =)
That was funny, assclowns!
please type the word in this image: stoned. Heh.
Molecular imprinting has been around for at least 15 or 20 years, and I have yet to see any binding affinities (strengths) that are really useful. Sure - if you have a 0.01 molar solution of some molecule you can make an imprint that will allow you to concentrate it to 0.02 molar. But with viruses the concentrations in blood are so low that you need an extremely high affinity (not to mention decent specificity - because of all the other competing molecules in the blood). Have not read the original work, but this sounds like a bunch of hype. Maybe there is a startup company brewing and they need the press.
If you bind-up all the glucose, then hypoglycemia could result, causing confusion, blackouts or seizures. Managing diabetes is not just about eliminating glucose, it is about balancing many variables - glucose, insulin, exercise, stress, hormones, illness, etc, etc. If one variable goes out of balance, you can get either hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia.
The only problem with antibodies, is that you can't make them on demand.
You can make molecule that bind DNA, for exemple, because it follows a simple A/T-C/G rule that we can easily model.
Form more complex structures where binding depends on complex 3D surface interactions, it isn't that much easy.
You can't synthesise an antibody just by looking the targeted substance.
The only way is to vaccine a rabbit with the target, wait the nature to work (a lot of lymphocyte will be trying different antibody configuration in parallel) and 5 days later harvest some blood to find the solution (a couple of lymphocytes will have been selected thru such trial and error for their ability to produce corresponding antibodies. Now they proliferate and produce antibodies. - You can either extract antibodies from the blood or seperate a couple of lymphocyte and grow them in lab).
Then let the rabbit have some "vacation" - to have time to wash out the vaccine and have the lymphocyte and antibodies level go back to background level.
But, as long as the structure and the surface properties are known (say, for example, the structure was determined by X-Ray crystallography), it may be more easy to try to synthesise a complementary shape.
In this article, they propose their own solution variant for such artificial affinity binding surface. But in an article expressly written as "we have found THE ultimate miracle solution that will CURE ALL DISEASES KNOWN TO MAN", in order to attract attention of potential investors/buyers.
As you say it's nothing that much revolutionary.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Kotex Bell(KAMANDER TACO)(1) dosen't even moderate this badly!!!!
hempen?
Then it's bad that you didn't get a chance to live in Middle Age or any other place/moment before modern medicine arrived. You could have gotten a so much better life expectancy of...
:
forty years.</sarcasm>
Modern medicine can reliably be considered as a source of better human condition, because
- when it was introduced in the occidental world, mortality rates did fall.
- in other countries where it was introduced later, we didn't see an increase of mortality rate due to "occidental-produced superbugs" migrating, but we saw a decrease of mortality later when medicine arrived there, too. (and has caused a lot of overpopulation troubles because mortality fell faster than natality)
- mortality keeps going lower, unaffected by what is actually called a super bug. The only thing that increase is some disease that are usually age related (like cancer) that we haven't seen that much back when people died younger.
You're confusing things. : /that don't require them/ (the rise of antibiotics-resistant skin bacteria in developed world is such an example).
"Super bugs" are problems linked not to the existence of drugs themselves, but to the abusive usage of drugs by
- industries that pour them happily in their flock's food or in basins where they raise fishes (The hugest proportion - the increase of H5N1's resistance to anything but Tamiflu is directly linked to the tendency of Asian poultry producers to almost literary feed them on other flu anti-virals)
- doctors under pressure of patient (usually too easily afraid mothers) prescribing them for disease
- patient not following the instructions for antibiotics correctly because they stop too early their treatment when they feel better because they are afraid of too much chemicals.
Have been the drugs used properly (prescribed by a doctor only when needed, and taken as they are supposed to be), we wouldn't have seen "super bugs".
Also, "super bugs" aren't in any way more dangerous to the general population than the corresponding "normal bugs".
They aren't "super" because they are more aggressive. They are "super" because the usual means used by modern medicine doesn't work as well as it used to be for killing them.
In other words : YOU ARE NOT in danger to being sick more easily from a "super bug".
You'll have as much risk to catch the future human-variant of the avian H5N1 flu, as any other flu (somewhere between the spanish flu and last winter's unremarkable flu depending on how much of your previous antibodies you can re-use. Although the spanish flu is very less likely because we don't have the same post-war social situation and poverty). It'll just be much more difficult to cure if we only have Tamiflu left (or worse, if Tamiflu doesn't work anymore because people have piled boxes and eaten it like candy because of the media-created mass fear).
You have as much risk to catch a disease from your Staphyloccocus Aureus (a bacteria that normally just "lives" on the skin surface of a significant part of the population and that is the most typical example of drug resisting "super bug"), whether it's MRSA (resists to most common penicillins and such), GISA/VRSA (difficult to kill with even the latest chemical inventions) or the "normal" wild type : i.e. near to none.
The "super bug" status means only that, in the very rare case when the bug provoke an infection (usually the bug is a problem in intensive care because it can "climb" along the perfusion needles from the skin surface to the blood stream), it can be a PITA because the patient defences are low because the patient is weak (in intensive care) and bec
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Not sure exactly how this would work as a filter, since viruses are hundreds of times smaller than Red Blood Cells (RBCs) and at least an ten times smaller than platelets, which are some of the smallest constituents of human blood.
Also, the article mentions how a virus might "fit" into a certain imprint hole, but if it's just a gel with a shape carved out in the form of a virus, how would the rest of the blood get through?
As earlier posters have mentioned, it sounds more like they are using the affinity of the gel for a virus filter, the problem being that in the case of many viruses (including HIV and rhinoviri - common cold), their envelope proteins mutate so often that an antibody's affinity will not help the body recognize it as an antigen the next time it is exposed.
"The sponge woks"? Sounds like incredibly ineffective cookware.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I though the virus sponge already existed. We always called it Paris Hilton...
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
this gives a whole new meaning to the term "sponge-worthy." Now it's a bad thing?
We already have a virus sponge. It's called Windows.
Oh c'mon, I chuckled. I say mod parent funny.
The reason is : computational complexity.
There are almost infinite quantity of permutations and mutations that an Lymphocyte may undergo while maturing to produce its definitive Heavy- and Light-chain parts of antibody. Predicting the shape of a given antibody gene is just as complex as predicting the structure for any other protein from it's RNA : too much complexe to be done in a reasonable amount of time. It's not a surprise that you see a lot of projects such as Folding@Home and Rosetta appearing on distributed networks - It's because the problem still requires a lot of data processing.
Yes, there are small designer peptide that are created for binding to proteins. They are more easily produced because they are short (and thus don't fold) and because they only need to stick to a specific point of the surface of the target protein to work.
Antibodies, on the other hand, are the molecular equivalent of huge protein clamps that catch a bigger amount of stuff in between their teeth (between the variable segment of aforementioned heavy- and light-chains). Their binding part has a complex folded 3D structure and we don't have the technology yet, given a target 3D surface/property map, to design a DNA sequence that will produce a protein that, once, folded properly, will be the exact matching complementary structure/property map of the target.
No. Not at all.
For a vaccine (wanting to train the immune system against a potential intruder), you inject something that *looks like* the target :
either separate parts of the target (from digested virus or synthetically made recombinant proteins), a target that doesn't work (killed or weakened virus) or some close cousin that doesn't provoke disease but has a similar structure enough to provoke cross-immunisation (vaccine come from vacca "cow" - the original donor of such virus [cow pox] close enough to the target [small pox] ).
Today's virus are most often recombinant (a gene from the virus has been copied into bacteria who synthesise a surface viral protein which is used in vaccines).
Antibodies may be used to cure disease for which there's no actual cure but there's resistant people animals :
you get lymphocyte from their blood, you multiply the lymphocyte, you harvest the antibodies they produce and you inject those antibodies to sick patient. In the patients, the antibody binds to the bug, then either the antibodies is recognised by whit blood cells, or some anti-{whatever animal the antibodies came from} human antibody binds to the injected antibody, and the whole bug + antibody (+ eventually a secondary antibody) is eaten by neutrophils and macrophages.
I think your confusing this two situations.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The medieval example was sarcastic.
:
Yes hygiene methods participate in greate part in the increaase lifespan. But modern medicine too.
Actual example can feature
- Drop of bacterial infections since antibiotics where discovered.
- The huge increase of life expectancy of people with AIDS since anti-HIV drugs appeared (one more argument why drug patents should be limited and developping countries should be authorised to make their own cheaper generic alternative).
- The drop of some kind of virus-induced cancers since corresponding virus can be fought (either through vaccines or anti-viral drugs).
- Not to speak the numerous benefit that modern surgery has brought, specially in terms of helping injured people.
As a personal experience, I can assure you that we are in fact under much more pressure from the insurance companies. And are the usual scape goat they point at every time they need to justify raising insurance cost.
:
Usually the drug companies are more trying to seduce us, and trying to persuade us to use their brand product instead of generic, or use their latest patented creation instead of the current drug that has proved to work. Great deal of money are thrown in PR for doctors (in fact a much higher part goes in PR than in R&D. Another argument why drug patents should be limited and developping countries should be authorised to make their own cheaper generic alternative).
Currently there are huge campaign in european countries both toward patients and doctors trying to inform that
- Brand drugs aren't necessarily better than generic (and the pharmacist are authorised to swap most drugs for a cheaper equivalent).
- Drug aren't systematically needed, specially antibiotics
- (toward doctors only) we are told to keep the costs low and prescribe only what is needed in the smallest needed quantities.
In Europe, we happen to have better university system where you don't necessarily spend most of you professional life paying up loans you made to afford your studies. We aren't pressured to make quick buck.
Good decision. The "if it ain't broken... " adage also applies to drug selection, if a drug has always perfectly worked, why change it ? Plus older un-patented drugs have much cheaper generics.
That are very important arguments.
This is a strong patient education problems. There's a fundamental tendency for patient to try to solve problems just by eating pills, without doing anymore efforts ti understand the problem and try to solve it for long term.
They don't want to see if they could change their habit to be somewhat less stressed, they only want a pill to sleep.
They don't want to undergo a long therapy at the shrink to address they fears in sexuality and self-confidence problems, they only want Viagra to hve stronger errection.
They don't want to go the whole hassle to understand what's the problem with their kids, they just want to give them some pills to make them shut the fuck up.
They want pain killer at the slightest problem.
They want antidepressor for the slightest problem in their lives.
etc...
Viagra/Vicodin/Fluctin/etc are slowly becoming the modern Heroin and Cocaine.
It's not only the pharma-PR, it's also the mentality of people who always want the quick'n'easy solution, and it's the society who ask too much from people to have them always out-performing.
Then there's also the economic system.
In the USA, the ultra-l
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I forsee nickelodeon making bank off the Spongebob implications.
2)Add modding here. 3)???? 4)Karma!
I don't know about this specific case, but in general a hydrogel already has water in it. So it does not remove water when exposed to blood - it exchanges liquid with it (passively by diffusion, or by flow if the liquid is force through the gel). And in this case is proposed to bind the virus when liquid containing the virus enters the gel.