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Re-Engineering the Immune System
destinyland notes a microbiology professor describing "Immunity on Demand" (or "Immunity 2.0") and wonders whether we could genetically engineer all the antibodies we need. "...there's a good chance this system, or something like it, will actually be in place within decades. Caltech scientists have already engineered stem cells into B cells that produce HIV-fighting antibodies — and an NIH researcher engineered T cells that recognize tumors which has already had promising clinical trials again skin cancer. Our best hope may be to cut out the middleman. Rather than merely hoping that the vaccine will indirectly lead to the antibody an individual needs, imagine if we could genetically engineer these antibodies and make them available as needed?"
Smarting up our immune system could turn to be a dumb idea, as a good part of us comes from virus
From TFA:
"We are not sure when this will all happen, but there’s a good chance it will, and perhaps the only question is when."
Hmmmmm . . .
Derya Unutmaz is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Pathology at N.Y.U. School of Medicine. His current research is focused on understanding the function of human immune system.
I can tell him right now what the function of the human immune system is: to keep us from getting sick.
I'll take his grant money now.
FTA:
All this is, of course, a delicate proposition. In some ways, an overactive immune system is as much of a risk as an underactive one: more than a million people worldwide a year die from collateral damage, like septic shock after bacterial infection, and inflammations that may ultimately induce chronic illness such as heart disease and perhaps even cancer.
This is just one possible outcome to programming new antibodies. I'd also be concerned with how the treatments mitigate any risk to shutting down our own immune system.
Hypothetical speculation: Say the treatment works well while you're taking regular doses of new Immunity 2.0 shots, but as soon as you can't afford to pay anymore, you're off the Immunity 2.0 shots. Well, it's been a while since your real immune system has had to work, so the next mutation of a virus comes along and 'oops'.
Most questions to risk will probably be found in lab research and trials, but it's still something to think about.
For most diseases the antibodies are easier to see because they are more widespread. It only takes a few virally infected cells to set off a massive immune response. The difficulty in engineering an antibody is the same difficulty as engineering any protein. Our knowledge of protein folding is still in it's infancy. So far, we have used evolutionary methods to find new antibodies. Perhaps someday we will be able to build them from the ground up, but not now.
If the exogenous antibodies end up hitting the wrong cells in some people, there could be major problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmunity Although I would expect that there would be some sort of pre-compatibility test to avoid major complications - but you can't realistically pre-test every cell type via biopsy.
The immune system isn't some kind of muscle, it doesn't really have "strength" in some neatly scalar way(OK, if your T-cell count is completely in the tank, you'd have a case for saying that your immune system is "weak").
You acquire immunity based on exposure to particular agents. If a new disease comes along, your immune system won't be properly trained no matter what you've been doing before. That is what makes it a "new" disease. Plus, the whole point of this approach would be that you could engineer antibodies on demand for the new disease, and take them before it kills you.
The immune system will, given time, almost always come up with antibodies and mount a response; but some conditions will kill you good and hard before you have time to mount that response. This is why vaccines are useful(since they provoke the same or similar response; but are harmless, so your immune system isn't racing against the clock). If you could engineer the antibodies themselves, you could get even faster response, and have something that would work even once you are infected.
It would, essentially, allow you to apply the technique that we currently use in Antivenom agents to diseases generally.
Hey wouldn't it be great if our bodies did this automatically...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Here's hoping I don't die before they invent invincibility... biologically speaking of course :)
Personally, I'm hoping they invent immortality instead. I've looked at the curves and honestly, relatively few people die "before their time" because we've become rather good at medicine but we've made very little impact on prolonging the real life span barring injury or disease. Very few of us, even those young today, will live to be 100 unless there's some real medical breakthroughs on repairing and restoring body and mind. If our bodies could stay like a 20 year old's forever, we could live to be a thousand years old already. The mortality rate for a 20 year old is <0,001.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm a Biologist, and you're somewhat mistaken. Antibodies are so infinitesimally tiny that no light microscope can possibly see them, even compared to virii which are also fairly invisible under a microscope. Antibodies are easy to detect, however, because they have a constant region on their tail end, which we know how to identify. We have compounds that bind to that constant tail end and as a result tag the antibody and what it is binding to. It's like the antibody is a flag pole, and biologists can run a colorful flag up that pole when we want to see what piece of the ground the flag pole is attached to.
... which is good if we know what the antibody gene sequence is already, but difficult to figure out on our own. Nature is much more efficient (and cost effective) at that kind of thing. Once we let nature figure out what's best, we can just figure out the gene sequence from there to mass produce the antibody.
Engineering antibodies is a simple matter, it's the basis of immunization/vaccination. Traditionally, we give chopped up bacteria and virii to a patient and their immune system detects those and creates more antibodies to put into the blood stream to stave off future infection. With this approach, instead we feed immune cells in a Petri dish an antigen, and they produce antibodies specific to that antigen. We can separate out these antibodies and purify them because they have that constant tail region that we can detect. We can then inject these into a person and these antibodies will cling to whatever thing they've been engineered to detect and attract the native immune system to it.
We can also use genetic engineering tricks to produce en masse a single specific kind of antibody. The technology has been there for research labs for decades. Either method will work fairly similarly, but in my opinion the former seems "easier", because we let the cells sort out what specific antibody to make. If we genetically engineer immune cells, we have to know exactly what gene sequence will produce an antibody targetting exactly what we want targetted
... for 20 years. They were called "Navy doctors". They had all the latest technology, were extremely skilled, and... free. Of course, taxpayer dollars were paying them, but 1) total costs per person in the military are a hell of a lot less than the mess we have going on in the world of private health insurance, and 2) for the cost of something like the Iraq war, we could have provided health coverage for the entire country for like 15 years. So it's not like we can't afford it.
People who bitch about "socialized medicine" should try it some time.
Lets cure all natural causes of death through the miracle of modern science. Then starve to death as the world becomes grossly overpopulated.
Problem: All evidence suggests the opposite. Eliminate all the most egregious morality concerns from a population, and they stop reproducing like rabbits. In the healthiest parts of the first word, population growth is going negative.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
> I'm a Biologist
> virii
So it's the biologists who are screwing up this beautiful language! The enemy is within the gates!
A pity about their children suffering from their parent's stupidity, but maybe they'll wise up once they grow up.
Alas, not just their own unfortunate kids. Ever read about Dana McCaffery? She was too young to be vaccinated, and she died of pertussis that the anti-vaxxers brought back. Then one of the local pro-disease dumbasses went and said that no one ever died of pertussis.
To be fair, pertussis is an environmental bacterium and is pretty common in adults -- it doesn't need anti-vaxx (aka "pro-disease") loons to "bring [i] back."
Not so measles -- that's one we could actually send off to join smallpox in the annals of extinct pathogenic viruses. Or we could, if it weren't for people like Andrew Wakefield, who saw a chance to make some money by killing children in the UK. Thus we have babies too young to be vaccinated contracting measles in their paediatricians' waiting rooms because somebody took their unvaccinated darlings to Switzerland and when they came back the little darlings came down sick. http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com/Jenny_McCarthy_Body_Count/Home.html
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I've always wondered whether some day it might be possible to have an implant that wirelessly receives new data definitions of proteins expressed by various pathogens and have it express the protein in a way that will trigger an immune response. Hence, you can automatically update everybody's immunity. Sort of like a computer virus scanner.
Microsoft Vaccine 2000 is configuring your immune system. This may take a few minutes. If your body stops responding for a long time and there is no brain activity please die. Setup will continue after you are reborn.