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New Ebola Drug 100% Effective In Monkeys
TrisexualPuppy writes "A team of scientists at Boston University has created a cure for the Ebola virus, first discovered in 1976. After setting the correct dosages, all monkeys tested with the vaccine survived with only mild effects. No tests have been performed on humans yet, as outbreaks happen infrequently and are difficult to track. Quoting NPR: '[The drug] contains snippets of RNA derived from three of the virus's seven genes. That "payload" is packaged in protective packets of nucleic acid and fat molecules. These little stealth missiles attach to the Ebola virus's replication machinery, "silencing" the genes from which they were derived. That prevents the virus from making more viruses.'"
This does not mean you can eschew the use of a condom when fucking monkeys.
"It seems simple enough to figure out the RNA sequence of a virus,"
I don't think it was 30 years ago.
who's up?
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
I don't think it was 30 years ago.
Exactly. I talked with one of my contacts at the Atlanta CDC about this. She said that little was said at that point about exactly how they procured this method, but it is something possible only with new technologies that have evolved in the past decade. That, and the limited amount of manpower dedicated to such a project mean that unless you're really lucky, it's going to take the full 30 years.
I wonder how many lives will eventually be saved and what awards will be gotten because of this.
...wouldn't this be a great generic treatment for all infections by viruses?
If not, I'd like to know the reason.
Because it only affect africans. Nobody dies in the US from it, so it's not really popular with research grants donators.
This is not the same as antibiotics.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Ebola's death rate is so high that this treatment would have to be extremely dangerous to keep it form being used. Death rates are in the 80-90% range now, so if it dropped them to even just 50% it's worth a large risk.
Because ebola is not a huge problem (yet)? It doesn't appear very contagious, kills rapidly - so may self-quarantine.
. . . and now, on BBC, "News for Parrots"
"No parrots were injured in Ebola tests . . ."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Also, the people that will need the drug have little or no ability to pay for it. It takes A LOT of money to get a drug approved, if the market for the drug itself is not there then the work just does not get done. The technique used will be applied to other, more profitable issues, so some good comes of it in the end.
It might be worthwhile to give drug companies a tax break for donating information that leads to effective cures for less profitable conditions... I'm sure there are many substances that have shown potential to help conditions that only have a few tens of thousands of sufferers or have many very poor sufferers and are thus a net loss if developed via normal channels.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
HIV adapts to antivirals.
Fortunately it is not especially transmissible and most people that are undergoing treatment are at least somewhat responsible about not exposing others.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Seriously though why wasnt this thought of this before?
Thought of? Sure, it's probably been thought of many times by people in the field. But having the technical ability to make it happen for real, that's new. There's several parts to that too, such as the ability to analyze the virus at that level (not been around very long, expensive but not as costly as it used to be), the ability to figure out what bits to interfere with where the virus will find it difficult to mutate and yet which won't harm the host (hard!) and the ability to manufacture and deliver the result. In particular, delivery of RNAi-based vaccines has been problematic in the past; if that's been cracked, it's a big breakthrough in itself.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
derive cures for other viruses?
I wonder how many lives will eventually be saved and what awards will be gotten because of this.
That's fantastic. Now they'll be able to starve to death instead.
Because they could probably make more by keeping it under wraps and suing the crap out of anyone else who tries this...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Except that 2 weeks is not long to spread. AIDS kills so many because it takes so long to get to work.
Ban animal testing!! Oh wait.
Viruses and disease is a way for mother nature to keep the balance of life, by taking this away we risk the possibility of killing off our species even faster. I only hope that I live long enough to watch 90% of the human population die because of our stupidity even though I may die as well it will be epic...
Since when does cure = vaccine?
Actually, this is more of a cure and definitely a form of genetic therapy (although the genetic material isn't incorporated into the patient's genome). The scientists used RNAi in which sequences of RNA complementary to the viral RNA are injected into the patient. When the complementary sequences bind together, they activate innate cellular defenses against double stranded RNA which destroy the genetic material, thus preventing the virus from replicating within the cell. If enough interfering RNA is present in the host for a long enough period of time, the virus will simply burn itself out.
How soon after you get infected would this treatment have to start? Also how soon into an ebola infection can you figure out it's ebola? Basically I'm wondering that because the scientists doing these tests know what the Monkeys are infected and can start anytime they want. I'd think delaying the treatment because of the diagnosis process would probably change the results.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I'm fairly sure I thought of it quite soon after I first learned how a virus works, in the same way that people thought of making a machine that works like a bird thousands of years ago. The step between thinking of what to do and doing it is huge. In this case, even the step between thinking of how to do it and actually doing it is pretty large.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When administered, it kills the monkey instantly.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Correct me if I am wrong but one of Ebola's nasty features is its ability to mutate efficiently to offset its achilles heel. It's achilles heel is that it tends to kills its victims too quickly to adequately reproduce and spread itself. This might be why outbreaks are not long lasting but are particularly lethal.
This is also an issue for people who can pay for a drug, even United States citizens who have health insurance. There have been recent news articles highlighting the fact that the United States is facing a shortage of various anti-venoms because corporations are either stopping production or never bothered to develop a manufacturing process because there is no significant profit potential.
This is an excellent idea but I would even go so far as to suggest taking out the "leads to effective cures" requirement as it can take a long time to reap the benefits and corporations would be more likely to utilize the offer if it provided an immediate tax benefit.
The recent move by GlaxoSmithKline that we all read about is a good example of a case where a corporation should be given a tax break.
However, tax breaks are far from enough. The only reason GSK was even researching a malaria vaccine was because of the huge profit potential from millions of infections globally. There are numerous ailments that will never receive corporate financing because there is no profit motive. Note the scorpion anti-venom case in the previously mentioned article where all the anti-venom is produced non-profit by a university professor and no corporation is willing to step up to create and sell a product.
Ultimately there are a vast number of medical and non-medical ventures that should be funded by the public because they do not present any significant profit potential to entice corporations but society would gain both tangible and intangible benefits.
Sadly the direction the United States appears to be headed is to a purist position of worship and submission to the almighty corporation, gross margins and a "greed is good" mentality. This can be seen in reading some of the articles on the anti-venom issue that suggest a solution is tort reform and easing of FDA regulations. Of course these arguments are a misnomer as these proponents admit themselves that the issue is a lack of profit potential and the suggested tort reform and easing of regulations are likely a one time benefit on the Internal Rate of Return calculation used to determine if a project is financially viable. The end result would still be no cures or research for low or no profit situations with the addition of federal protection for corporations against law suits from the public and elimination of regulations that are in place to help prevent the conditions that result in law suits in the first place.
Viruses don't really have a lifespan. Ebola is short-lived because it's so deadly. While resistance generally does make a virus/bacteria/parasite less effective overall (resistance comes at a cost), random mutations will do the same a lot more quickly. Apparently that's not a successful strategy for the virus.
That said, if we manage to keep people from dying but not keep them from spreading the virus then that would be bad. Obviously, to get these antivirals, you're already in the quarantine. Unlike your typical bacterial infection, Ebola is serious enough that you're going to be isolated and gladly take every single dose of your medicine until you (and your doctors) are sure that you are no longer infected.
I don't think it was 30 years ago.
Further to your point, this treatment is heavily dependent on PCR (polymerase chain reaction) techniques, which are very much a stock-in-trade tool of molecular biology now, but has only been technically possible since (IIRC) 1976 when the DNA polymerase from Thermophilus aquaticus was first isolated. The components required for the reactions were available by about 1980, and I think the first automatic machines became available in about '83 or '84.
They were, of course, under patent and very expensive. Nowadays, it seems everybody has a PCR machine in his kitchen, but replication of RNA fragments is still a bit more involved than replication of DNA, since (for one reason) RNA tends to be a lot less stable. I have no idea how much a dose of this treatment would cost, but I would bet it would be very, very expensive.
Qualifications: Must not be squeamish about seeing blood and be willing to play the odds.
You off a Howler monkey during a test you just need to do your report (necropsy ect) and get another monkey
Off a human during a test and you have
1 a much larger report
2 a very detailed autopsy
3 a report to Legal to make sure your "assets" are covered
4 a possible lawsuit from the next of kin
5 it gets a bit harder to get more humans when you have a track record of offing your volunteers
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how many monkeys did they test? 12?
This is an excellent idea but I would even go so far as to suggest taking out the "leads to effective cures" requirement as it can take a long time to reap the benefits and corporations would be more likely to utilize the offer if it provided an immediate tax benefit.
While I agree that this would greatly increase the incentive, I think that companies would then donate floods of information that they knew or suspected would in the end prove unproductive... because they reap an immediate benefit and that looks good on the quarterlies... If I have a dog, I expect it to act true to it's nature (i.e. "like a dog"). You can pretty much count on corporations to behave in a corporate manner. Maybe a structured schedule of small breaks for information and later "bonus" benefits for the stuff that pays off... I would even go so far as give better initial benefits to companies that develop a track record of contributing information that payed off... as well as the aforementioned bonus.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
That raises a question: should cures for illnesses with nearly 100% kill ratio be held to the same standards as cures for illnesses that are unlikely to kill you? After all, if the drug is guaranteed to kill the virus, then as long as it's less likely to kill you than the virus is it's in your best interests to take it. In the case of Ebola, drugs with mortality rates less 50% (90% for some strains of the virus) are going to increase your chances of survival, so does it really make any sense to keep them from market even if they kill 1 in 10 patient?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
One could only imagine an ebola like venereal disease. AIDS with a 90% death rate and a two week period from infection to death.
That sounds frightening- and I'm sure it would be if you actually caught it- but it would quite likely be self-limiting since people would probably die before they were likely to spread it to many- if any- other partners (two week max. window, reduced by period they were visibly ill during), and the trail of infected people would be clear- unlike "normal" AIDS where the delay of symptoms over years could make that *much* less obvious.
It's been said that ebola's aggressiveness in killing people quickly and visibly- and the fact it kills of the host quickly- is the reason it hasn't spread further.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
No, we get a bunch of autistic monkeys instead.
Expect a statement from renowned scientists and vaccine experts Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carey soon.
Carry on.
It's only 100% effective until the first successful mutation of the virus allows it to survive.
Tested population = 6 monkeys, but keep it in perspective.
Still a great accomplishment.
I can't imagine the fallout that would occur if an ebola victim went to a major international airport. It'd be horrific, and even if, as in previous cases, the ebola virus "burned out" fast, it could be an international crisis.
Let's somehow keep this around, unlike coral snake anti-venom which is months away from being lost.
Could this RNA technique be applied to the HIV virii family as well
The Romans had no plural for virus. Therefore, the English plural is viruses . For more mistakes with latin not to make, see http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2139/what-is-the-plural-of-penis.
Speaking in terms of survival analysis:
The reported overall survival probability for an Ebola patient is supposedly 10%. But how many people/animals naturally have an immunity to Ebola, therefore they got infected but had no symptoms, therefore they never knew it? Then the marginal probability of surviving an Ebola infection may be greater than 10%.
Also, the survival probability changes over time depending on how long they were infected. An Ebola patient who has already survived, say, 5 days is more likely to survive than an Ebola patient who has survived 1 day so far.
The drug's effectiveness is likely to differ depending on how long after the infection it was administered. Also, what is the drug's lethality on uninfected patients?
Do survival durations for uninfected/infected individuals follow a predictable distribution, such as an exponential, Weibull, or log-normal distribution? Animal researchers typically assume an underlying parametric distribution, through which they can claim higher power, greater significance. But in human studies, the semiparametric Cox model (assuming a nonparametric distribution) is the standard; since this has less power, that is one reason studies often fail in human models.
Many factors to consider.
'She said that little was said at that point about exactly how they procured this method, but it is something possible only with new technologies that have evolved in the past decade.'
Yes, their method clearly depends on RNAi (RNA interference), for which the key paper only came out in 1998, and the Nobel Committee obviously didn't regard the discovery as 'simple enough'!:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2006/adv.html
It wasn't until 2001 that RNAi was demonstrated in mammalian cells, so its use as a standard tool in molecular biology only dates back to the last decade. To apply this sort of strategy to Ebola also requires knowledge of its genome sequence, which also wasn't complete until the 90s, as well as an effective method of getting the active molecules into infected cells (like the lipid-based packaging approach used here). There is indeed active research aimed at applying RNAi to other viruses, including HIV, but it's far from straightforward.
We already have a cure for AIDS. They're called condoms.
404: sig not found.
There, you're realistically describing an airborne version of such a virus, not an STD, and probably not even the multiple bodily fluids borne version that is the baseline Ebola virus. An STD is really a disease that spreads so poorly only direct membrane to bodily fluid contact tends to spread it. STDs typically won't spread dry skin to dry skin, or by fluids if those are exposed to sunlight or cold for even a few minutes, and they die very, very quickly if exposed to many common environmental stressors other germs resist, for example, pool Chlorine or hot weather.
I don't want to make light of your comment - certainly, there are scenarios, for example Person A dies of Ebola at airport B, plane that brought the victim has already gone on to next stop with new passengers seated in that row, that could easily cause, as you say, an international crisis. But these are possibilities even if the disease doesn't infect anyone else.
Fortunately, Ebola is very far from developing the protein coat it would need to allow airborne exposure.
Who is John Cabal?
OK, you've just said something that is nearly 100% true, but has almost no meaning outside of the context you've left out. RNA mutates just as DNA does, and is subject to selection in theory. So, an RNA based virus can evolve. But, there are important differences.
1. Just about every gene in a virus is vital, as that same evolutionary pressure selects to weed out all the junk code at a much higher rate. The penalties a virus pays for hauling any gene not vitally needed are so big, it has to hijack something else's reproductive code to duplicate itself. So just about every mutation in the remaining code is seriously negative - positive mutations in 'advanced' organisms are rare, but for viruses they are literally millions of times rarer.
2. RNA based organisms are all non-sexual reproducers, so there is no second copy of anything from chromosome pairing, to take up slack for any gene that gets damaged either. That probably further amplifies the effects of point 1.
So, you get lots of mutation in viruses, but very little evolution because there are almost no positive selection events associated with that mutation. Scientists have even come up with the term Stochastic mutation to describe what some viruses do (HIV for one). In such cases, you get regular mutation at certain key points, but no essentially NO selection. HIV may eventually mutate in a fashion that is subject to selection pressure in the wild, but the four common stochastic mutations it displays won't be the path to any such changes.
Overall, viruses have very fast reproductive cycles, i.e. an HIV virus will typically reproduce between 100 and 200 copies in 1 1/2 to 2 days. If it weren't that there's so little selection pressure, they would likely overwhelm us "higher" life-forms totally.
Who is John Cabal?
We already have a cure for AIDS. They're called condoms.
Oh wow, for real? What do you do with a condom to cure someone with AIDS?
It is indeed a self-limiting disease, and thus not on everyone's priority list, but if the summary is correct, this is great news not only because it prevents an extremely deadly disease, but because it may give insight into combating RNA viruses as a whole, historically a difficult problem.
The poster is wrong to refer to the drug as a "vaccine". A vaccine works by stimulating the body's immune system to develop antibodies against the disease. This drug works by attacking the disease directly.
-deane
That as may be, though we weren't speaking about ebola per se, rather a hypothetical disease similar to ebola in speed of death, but with AIDS-like transmission route.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
if the next monkey dies then the effectivity of this new cure drops to 80%. imho the topic title might be a little sensationalist. just sayin'
I wonder how many lives will eventually be saved and what awards will be gotten because of this.
You're quite an optimist. My first thought was: Great... I wonder how long it will take the US military to start sticking ebola zaire into missiles. :-/
that's not a cure that's a precaution, ..
they die very, very quickly if exposed to many common environmental stressors other germs resist, for example, pool Chlorine
Then explain why, at the hotel near me, the pool was closed due to AIDS.
Squirrel!
An unfortunate side effect was it made the monkeys very very angry and aggressive. Monkeys infected with this "Rage" are not to be approached, and if you are bitten a level 9 quarantine should be immediately put into effect. Currently the monkeys are being held in a minimum security facility "Econo-Labs" which is located right next door to Peta National headquarters. We will try making the monkeys watch FOX news, mostly because we are a bunch of dicks...