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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.
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.
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.
. . . 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
Except that 2 weeks is not long to spread. AIDS kills so many because it takes so long to get to work.
Outside Africa, that's the generally accepted point of view.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
how many monkeys did they test? 12?
'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.
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?
That is stupid. No animal is worth more than another animal, humans included.
You want to solve a human problem? Use humans.
Wow... Someone needs to be taken for a walk
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!