'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."

Comments

Re:Eh

[Anarchysoft]

Rather than this dodgy "aerogel" technique, you could use the molecules that nature has used for millenia : antibodies. But then what they patent and sell for gazillions of dollars? ;)

Sounds exciting but...

[janek78]

It would be great if it worked, but filtering a molecule (using whatever this "imprint" is) has to be order of magnitude simpler than filter something as complex as a virus out of something as complicated as human blood. If they get it to work, it would be perfect for "filtering" any viruses out of donor blood before transfusions.

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. :)

Re:Not just for viruses

[tOaOMiB]

Unfortunately amyloid beta protein builds up in cells (and extracellular matrix). The problem with the buildup is that it's insoluble. So, being insoluble, and in the brain, and not in the blood...make it a pretty poor candidate for this technology.

Re:To quote Seinfeld

[LifesABeach]

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

Re:Eh

[TheMeuge]

Exactly.

This is not just reinventing the wheel, but also making it square.

There are real issues with the execution of this procedure, but we also have to consider the ridiculousness of the premise in the first place. For something like the avian flu, the major damage is done on epithelial surfaces, not in the bloodstream. I don't think systemic effects of the flu have anything to do with it being in the blood either.

The majority of replicating virus will be within the cells of the respiratory epithelium. "Filtering" the blood would do virtually nothing for the course of the disease. Maybe this would be feasible as a first-line treatment for a Hepatitis or HIV needle-stick, where the virus is strictly in the bloodstream, and hasn't established viral reservoirs yet. But for that we might as well use an antibody-coupled column.

So in summary - the technology is interesting, but this doesn't seem to be the appropriate application for it, at least not in the described context.

Re:Eh

[iminplaya]

Really. You see this in all sorts of industries where strong patent and copyright laws exist. Let's look at desalination, for instance. I can sell a multi million dollar, patented reverse osmosis machine and the power needed to run it. Or I could show you a method collecting fresh water that falls from the sky every day, all day, with a minor effort on our part for distribution. As a government that owes much debt to the industries the placed it into power, or the industry itself, which do you think I'm going to recommend? Food? Same thing. Good farming practices and a decent distribution system unfettered by political ambitions AND an end to war, will put an immediate end to hunger, without the use of poisonous, yet very profitable and patentable fertilizers and insecticides. All this without even touching the subject of GM foods being rushed to market for a quick buck, nothing more. Is anybody out there aware that money does literally grow on trees? We've just grown accustomed to the necessity of depending on the huge banking industry to process it to make it "useful". To me, it's all still selling refrigerators to the Eskimos.

People who go along with this are the same that believe in "better living through chemistry". They actually believe that we live longer because of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. It's quite possible that just the opposite is true. Their drugs are responsible for creating the super bugs our bodies can't eliminate naturally, thus actually creating a physical dependency on them. These people aren't helping us. They are killing us!

Medicine did improve human condition

[DrYak]

They actually believe that we live longer because of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. It's quite possible that just the opposite is true.

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.

Their drugs are responsible for creating the super bugs our bodies can't eliminate naturally, thus actually creating a physical dependency on them.

You're confusing things.
"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 /that don't require them/ (the rise of antibiotics-resistant skin bacteria in developed world is such an example).
- 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