New Drug Could Cure Nearly Any Viral Infection

HardYakka writes "A team of researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory have designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection. The researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever."

Comments

It's called Kalocin.

[dtmos]

1969 called. They want their drug back.

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[MBCook]

That would actually be my worry. Enough people already take drugs when they have the slight discomfort or to cure their flu (despite anti-bacterials having no effect on the flu). What's going to happen when they can take a drug for all that stuff? At the rate we use drugs, it seems like this one would be burned out and ineffective pretty fast unless the government really restricts it (more the Cipro or other other drugs that are left).

The idea of bugs that become resistant to all this stuff, or a drug that people can't stop taking because of horrible side effects... that sounds like great news. Can we please be careful not to invent/breed ourselves into a pseduo-Descolada?

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[webmistressrachel]

Well played, good sir. I missed that completely and posted a stupid naive response, accompanied by a loud woosh sound as it went over my head...

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[cayenne8]

The hell with all of this.

Just come up with a cure for AIDS...so we can all get laid again without worrying or feeling guilty about screwing without a fuckin' rubber.....

Geez, the day they cure AIDS, I'm predicting the divorce rate will skyrocket with a ton of guys going "Later Bitch"....and not having to worry about dying if they get laid by someone different.

Oh well....sure would be nice to go back to the days before AID's..when you really didn't worry as long as she was on the pill, and anything you caught for the most part...could be cured with a quick shot.

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[MBCook]

That doesn't mean that there can't be bad reprocussions to over-use of a real drug that can cure a large number of illnesses, assuming the drug works out in trials. How useful is Penicillin these days? How much worse is MRSA compared to the weaker infections that people used to get? Fiction could end up being sadly prophetic, if we're not careful.

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[HungryHobo]

How useful is Penicillin these days?

still fairly useful.Not as useful as it used to be but still good.

How much worse is MRSA compared to the weaker infections that people used to get?

no worse. it's just that we've become so accustomed to antibiotics working insanely well that when a handful of bugs become resistant they seem far scarier than their ancestors despite being no more deadly.

It's hard to comprehend how deadly bacterial infections were before Penicillin. Getting just a taste of it in the form of MRSA only seems scarier relative to how thing have been since penicillin.

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[cayenne8]

Wow, did this post ever reveal a lot about you.

You say that like it is a bad thing?

:)

Just saying...feel sorry for the kids today..back in my day, you could fuck anything that moves, and the worst thing you worried about was getting her pregnant....but most of them were on the pill, so that wasn't as big a worry. And if you caught the clap or something, all you needed was a shot. You also didn't feel forced to be so monogamous for health reasons.

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[HungryHobo]

the thing is that looking into the way that it works: it's hard to see any straightforward way for most of these viruses to evolve a resistance.

It targets dsRNA which is very central to their life cycle.

it's the difference between an animal evolving a resistance to a poison and evolving a resistance to having it's internal organs ripped out.

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[interkin3tic]

That doesn't mean that there can't be bad reprocussions to over-use of a real drug that can cure a large number of illnesses, assuming the drug works out in trials. How useful is Penicillin these days?

I seem to recall hearing that part of the problem of antibiotic resistance was when antibiotics aren't used to completion. Treating until the symptoms were largely gone, but not all the infectious agent would give that remainder a good shot at developing resistance genes and proliferating, instead of being killed off completely.

Also we hopefully won't be as cavalier about deploying these antivirals as we were when antibiotics were first discovered and we hadn't already encountered resistance. We probably could have figured it out then I suppose. Horizontal gene transfer with viruses is also different from bacterium. Bacterium can easily share plasmids that confer resistance to antibiotics, so they can share the knowledge with other bacterium. I think there's some possible gene swapping when in a host cell, but being dormant outside a host cell, a virus is going to have less chances to pass resistance genes around.

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[v1]

the thing is that looking into the way that it works: it's hard to see any straightforward way for most of these viruses to evolve a resistance.

It targets dsRNA which is very central to their life cycle.

Read up on Penicillin for comparison. It was considered a "wonder drug" for the time because it had the same idea, attack a critical mechanism used only by bacteria:

antibiotics work by inhibiting the formation of peptidoglycan cross-links in the bacterial cell wall.

Then penicillin went into massive-scale use all over the world. It took a number of years, but now we have a whole bunch of resistant bacteria. The reason it's hard to find an effective poison on roaches is because of how short their life cycle is, combined with the use of sexual reproduction. (an unusual combination in life) Now look at bacteria and viruses, that clone themselves. They have a life cycle not measured in months or weeks, but in minutes. It totally changes the game.

It really wouldn't matter if so many genes were randomly tweaked every generation that 90% of the "offspring" were unviable. It could still spread effectively. So mutation is the card they play, heavily. And this makes them very good at rapid adaptation to drugs. They'll find a way to block the drug. Or make the drug ineffective. Or metabolize the drug. Or find a totally different approach to the problem the drug creates. All through random trial-and-error. If I give you six dice and tell you I win as long as you don't roll six 1's, if you roll enough, eventually you'll win. And you only need to win once. Then that technique, being the only survivor, is free to multiply without limit. And you get to roll the dice a million times. It's easy math.

The current method to prevent this adaption is giving "cocktails" of several different kinds of drugs, that have different ways of killing viruses/bacteria. The idea being that a single bacteria in the presence of say, three different drugs, will have to randomly mutate a resistance to all three, on the same roll of the dice. The odds of this are a great deal lower, and help offset the short life cycle advantage. But lets face it, eventually it will happen, and when it does, if we don't find a way to eradicate it immediately, we're screwed, because now we have a bug in the wild that we have no way to kill.

So, there is no "magic potion" that does kill and will kill all bacteria or virius. And there never will be. Best we can do is try to stay a step (or two, if we're very lucky) ahead of them. Or at least not fall too far behind. (like we did for awhile with AIDS)

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[AK Marc]

But Viruses must change the host cell. They do so to procreate. If they didn't, they would die. Once the virus enters a cell, that cell is going to die. The only difference is whether the cell can be killed quickly before replication, or whether it dies because it made so many virus copies it exploded. This drug apparently attacks cells infected, so the cell is much more likely to die before it has replicated massive numbers of the viruses. That isn't an attack on the virus. That's an attack on the host. So the virus will have little mechanism to evolve out of that, hopefully extending the time this treatment is effective such that global application of this drug (even among the "healthy" who could be carriers or incubating something) could wipe out nearly all viral infections. Every June, everyone in the planet takes 4 weeks of anti-virals, and 10 years later, there are no human-only strains of viruses (the only ones left being ones that can be transferred cross-species, in which case we can address it in the host species via drugs or genocide and cure humans of all viruses. Can we even imagine a world with no viruses?

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[phoenix321]

I don't know where and when the "it feels good, so it must be bad" meme entered the Western hive mind. Have we come to a point where a harmless, but very satisfying activity is frowned upon because of it's harmlessness? Have we come to a point, where every action, every pleasure, every thought must have some rational meaning or be an indispensable element of some great planet-saving master plan?

There's almost no product, no advertisement, no activity, no pleasure, no part of life that is not overloaded with pro- or anti-guilt messages about saving or destroying the entire planet. Everything we do is increasingly put into a worldwide context of a global ecological theory of everything. When the prospect of harmless but gratifying sexual relations to return after AIDS is cured, I find this very unsettling, to say the least, to call this "uneducated". Can't educated and smart people, too, just like everyone else, have some fun even if that's not related to saving the planet this time, please?

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[RsG]

The stupidity of it all is that MRSA is not necessary and can be prevented.

While I agree with you that overuse of antibiotics for trivial purposes has sped up the development of resistant strains, I think you're overstating it. The tone of your post suggests you blame MRSA entirely on factory farming and physician incompetence/laziness, which simply isn't the case.

To begin with, there are two more or less unavoidable problems that lead to the development of resistant strains. The first is that people prescribed antibiotics for actual bacterial infections often stop taking them when the symptoms abate, rather than taking the full course. The second is that hospitals are breeding grounds for resistant infections. Even a well managed hospital isn't completely safe.

Now, you can reduce those problems with public education and changes to hospital policies, but you can't eliminate the threat, which brings us to the larger issue; resistant strains are inevitable. In a perfect world, where no antibiotics were misused and all hospitals were entirely sterile, there would still arise antibiotic resistant bacteria over time. Basic evolution in action.

So no, MRSA and it's kin cannot be prevented, they can merely be reduced in prevalence.

Now, obviously new treatments can be devised to try and shift our antibacterial measures as the bacteria adapt; in particular if we retire treatments that have become ineffective, the strains resistant to those drugs might die out from competition, allowing us to revive "useless" antibiotics decades or more in the future.

Doing what you suggest - essentially banning antibiotic misuse - is still a good idea, but without the other solutions mentioned above, it's just a delaying tactic.

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[ceoyoyo]

You're arguing from analogy without really understanding your analogy.

Penicillin interferes with the way many bacteria build cell walls, but there are lots that are naturally resistant to penicillin because they build their cell walls differently. Bacteria also love to swap genes, so eventually that minor cell wall modification got spread around. The fact that penicillin was considered a wonder drug had more to do with it being the first antibiotic discovered. And there wasn't really an "idea" with using penicillin. It's a substance made by a mould that was observed to kill some bacteria. It wasn't designed.

This antiviral appears to attack a pretty critical, and possibly difficult to modify component of many viruses. Plus it causes apoptosis, which for a virus is kind of like a nuclear bomb. Or castration. We routinely castrate cows... do you think they might evolve a resistance?

Bleach is used more widely than penicillin yet there are no bacteria that have evolved a resistance to it.

Re:It's called Kalocin.

[Kral_Blbec]

How many free sex societies have prospered in human history? I can't think of any. There have been several that tried, but none that lasted long.
IMO it is because the mindset that puts such high value on instant gratification of any sort is not the type to instill other societal virtues as, patience, self-control, and charity. It is just about me, right now.
Even today you can look at communities where promiscuity is the norm and see the contrast in quality of life compared to a "regular" community.

HIV?

[webmistressrachel]

Any news on HIV / AIDS? Strange that that isn't the first virus threw into the petri dish with this stuff, to be honest.

Re:HIV?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Any news on HIV / AIDS? Strange that that isn't the first virus threw into the petri dish with this stuff, to be honest.

You're thinking like a scientist. Think like a business man. You cure the common cold first. That gets you 9 million units of fame, some nice early revenues from cold cures, and a ginormous grant to test if it can cure HIV as well.

Well, in reality, HIV is a single-stranded retrovirus, and not a double-stranded virus. Although, if this works, it will mitigate some of the negative effects of AIDS, in that it does not appear to rely on the body's immune system.

Re:HIV?

[Daniel_Staal]

So you take the person into a clean room, administer the drug, wait a few weeks for their immune system to grow back (possibly from transplant or stem cell therapy), and they walk out cured. Not a bad deal.

Re:HIV?

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA: "We have demonstrated that DRACOs are effective against viruses with DNA, dsRNA, positive-sense ssRNA, and negative-sense ssRNA genomes; enveloped and non-enveloped viruses; viruses that replicate in the cytoplasm and viruses that replicate in the nucleus; human, bat, and rodent viruses; and viruses that use a variety of cellular receptors"

Re:HIV?

[digitalderbs]

I'm a biophysicist that works on the flu--though not a virologist--and I'd like to mention a couple of related points. First, as another poster had stated, this does not only work for double-stranded RNA viruses. Look at table 1. The influenza virus and HIV are both very similar--class I enveloped viruses with single-stranded RNA genomes. I'd imagine this could have some effect toward HIV, as it is effective with the flu. However, it would appear that once the HIV RNA has been reverse-transcribed to cDNA and integrated into the genome, then the approach presented in this paper would not work--i.e. if you have AIDS, this won't help you.

Re:HIV?

[Firethorn]

There's a rather big difference between T-cells, which is what HIV infects, and "the whole human."

I agree; at most you'd likely have to stick the person into an isolation area as the die-off of T-Cells blows an HIV infection into an advanced case of AIDS in a matter of hours. Of course, once HIV is purged T-Cells would quickly return to normal levels, probably a couple weeks.

Re:HIV?

[j-pimp]

We... already have a treatment for HIV after you get it. The cocktails are now such that HIV has very little effect on life expectancy.

Even if money were no object (with socialized medicine it still comes from somewhere), There is a big difference between "take this drug forever" and take it for a short period of time. If you have aids, you can't go living someplace where you can't get your medicine, so that makes climbing a mountain, or living in space or a submarine harder. Most people don't want to go to that extreme, but how about disappearing for a few days?

Re:HIV?

[phoenix321]

Bone marrow constantly builds new immune cells. Patients kept in total quarantine will survive when no other diseases can reach them until their immune system is built up again. Problem solved.

Procedure is used for a Leukemia and other diseases, so there exists medical experience on it.

Re:HIV?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

However, it would appear that once the HIV RNA has been reverse-transcribed to cDNA and integrated into the genome, then the approach presented in this paper would not work--i.e. if you have AIDS, this won't help you.

Won't CURE you, because it won't clean out the dormant virus. But if you're taking it when the virus activates it will kill off the affected cells. So taking it in an ongoing fashion should stop the effects of AIDS and gradually reduce the population of dormant infected cells as they become activated and then die.

Might be interesting to see if it could be combined with another drug to trigger the activation of dormant HIV (preferably activating just the virus, not the normal functions of uninfected cells). A couple rounds of that should clean out most of the dormant infection.

Re:HIV?

[Chris Burke]

So you take the person into a clean room, administer the drug, wait a few weeks for their immune system to grow back (possibly from transplant or stem cell therapy), and they walk out cured. Not a bad deal.

Yes it would have to be a transplant or stem cell therapy since HIV infects the bone marrow which produces blood and immune cells, and so would necessarily have to be killed.

There are many possible problems and complications from a bone marrow transplant. Stem cell therapy would get rid of the greatest one, the rejection of non-closely matched marrow, but many would remain. Without that therapy, it would be very dangerous to use this route in the majority of cases where close matches can't be found. Leukemia patients won't undergo a transplant in the absence of a close match until the leukemia is about to go into the acute phase and kill them.

A bone marrow transplant has already been used to cure AIDS. But it is not clear that this is the best choice if you have access to modern AIDS drugs.

Re:HIV?

[Daniel_Staal]

It wouldn't necessarily have to be either one, if the drug is targeted enough and the body can recover. Assuming the drug only kills infected cells, and has a 100% kill rate, it's likely it would leave some cells intact that hadn't been infected. Not enough to support normal immune response on their own, but perhaps enough to regrow the rest naturally.

This of course is wild speculation; we wouldn't know until we try. The main point is still that if you can kill (just) the infected cells fairly easily, you are well on your way to designing a treatment. It may not be simple, and it may not be cheap, but you should have options.

Re:HIV?

[eparker05]

Biosafety clearance is a complicated subject and ease of transmission can have as much to do with a high level as virulence. I just looked it up and both HIV and influenza are both BSL 2 (fairly low, but not trivially so)

What's a virus?

[lymond01]

So does a false positive mean you're dead?

Drug: Must find viruses. Oh, there's one...I think. And that one too. Oooh, actually, they're ALL viruses!

Re:What's a virus?

[kylemonger]

Maybe. But since only an idiot would take the drug unless they knew they were already infected with something bad, I'd say the risk is acceptable.

Re:What's a virus?

[gcnaddict]

I'd be more concerned if it treats cells infected with a latent virus in the fashion described here, to be honest.

For instance, lets assume Alzheimer's is caused (as suspected) by a combination of a defective APoE gene and an HSV1 infection. So if the vast majority of brain cells are infected but the brain is (more or less) still highly functional... wouldn't this theoretically kill every one of those brain cells, essentially advancing alzheimer's itself many-fold in a matter of weeks?

The important question is:

[rongage]

What exactly does this do to the host organism (us) that is carrying these infected (and sub sequentially killed off) cells?

Since I don't speak micro-biologist, I'm not sure that was even addressed or answered in the article.
 

Re:The important question is:

[afidel]

Almost all cells that are infected will be destroyed anyways once the virus takes it over and uses it as a replication factory so it should be a net win if it is administered before the virus has really had a chance to take off.

Todd Rider

[Scareduck]

Also the man who has so far explained why inertial-confinement fusion can't work. Maybe.

I knew he was involved in medical research, but this is pretty awesome.

Re:Todd Rider

[fph il quozientatore]

The combination of the two fields triggers my "possible crackpot" alert. Plus the fact that googling for "Todd Rider" returns Wikipedia and pop-sci articles, but no "real" scientific publications. Can anyone in the field comment on the credibility/reputation of Dr. Rider? I don't intend to be offensive, maybe he's really a top guy in the field, it's just that both claims are quite bold and I'd be happy to get some external confirmation.

Re:Todd Rider

[ColdWetDog]

The combination of the two fields triggers my "possible crackpot" alert. Plus the fact that googling for "Todd Rider" returns Wikipedia and pop-sci articles, but no "real" scientific publications. Can anyone in the field comment on the credibility/reputation of Dr. Rider? I don't intend to be offensive, maybe he's really a top guy in the field, it's just that both claims are quite bold and I'd be happy to get some external confirmation.

Yeah, I've just skimmed it. It's plausible. There are two problems - the first is getting it into the cells. The system they used:

For delivery into cells in vitro or in vivo, DRACOs can be fused with proven protein transduction tags, including a sequence from the HIV TAT protein [28], the related protein transduction domain 4 (PTD) [29], and polyarginine

really isn't a good drug delivery system. That's the problem with a number of targeted therapies - you have to get to the target in large enough numbers to be useful medically and with an easy enough system to be useful clinically.

Secondly, what they do is to bind large double stranded RNA molecules (which, according TFA exist primarily in RNA viruses, NOT in mammalian cells) and then use part of the immune system to attack that complex.

What they DO NOT DO is show that this hybrid system would be effective in a real organism, as opposed to a petri dish. I am going to bet that once you get this puppy inside the bloodstream, all hell is going to break loose via the immune system and create a bunch of untoward side effects.

An interesting bit of research (if it can be validated), they way it is pitched in the article is way too aggressive for a scientific publication and sounds more like an investment vehicle.

Re:Todd Rider

[AmbushBug]

RTFA:

Most of the tests reported in this study were done in human and animal cells cultured in the lab, but the researchers also tested DRACO in mice infected with the H1N1 influenza virus. When mice were treated with DRACO, they were completely cured of the infection. The tests also showed that DRACO itself is not toxic to mice.

So they have tried it on a real organism. And it appears to have worked as expected (yay!).

Re:Todd Rider

[Michael Woodhams]

Use Google Scholar instead of plain Google. He looks to have plenty of real science to his credit. (Although I'm betting those 1930s papers were someone else...)

Re: Wow, just wow.

[dtmos]

If Slashdot impresses you, try EurekAlert.

Re:Not sufficent

[Chemisor]

Don't worry. DRACO is patented until 2029.

Re:too good to be allowed?

[ShavedOrangutan]

I'm sure one of the utopian countries with socialized medicine will make it work first, since nothing good can come from capitalism.

Re:Cure AIDS and all STDs at once?

[hawkeyeMI]

There are plenty of bacterial STDs.

Abstract from PLoS One

[pz]

Here's the abstract of the paper. Note that the summary forgot to mention that the drug has been tested in normal cell lines as well. Also not mentioned is that all of this testing in live animals (not the cell lines) has been in mice and lots and lots of things go wrong when taking a drug developed in a mouse model to humans. It helps a lot that some of the normal cell lines shown to be unaffected were human.

Currently there are relatively few antiviral therapeutics, and most which do exist are highly pathogen-specific or have other disadvantages. We have developed a new broad-spectrum antiviral approach, dubbed Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) that selectively induces apoptosis in cells containing viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells. We have created DRACOs and shown that they are nontoxic in 11 mammalian cell types and effective against 15 different viruses, including dengue flavivirus, Amapari and Tacaribe arenaviruses, Guama bunyavirus, and H1N1 influenza. We have also demonstrated that DRACOs can rescue mice challenged with H1N1 influenza. DRACOs have the potential to be effective therapeutics or prophylactics for numerous clinical and priority viruses, due to the broad-spectrum sensitivity of the dsRNA detection domain, the potent activity of the apoptosis induction domain, and the novel direct linkage between the two which viruses have never encountered.

As some posters suggested, there might be problems with herpes-style infections where the virus has infected nerve cells and gone dormant. The authors did not mention this in the paper as far as I could tell.

Re:We are doomed then

[Whorhay]

The mechanics of how the drug works should actually make simple virus mutations incredibly unlikely to result in resistance.

The drug is a protien that is triggered by the virus's production of double stranded DNA. Double Stranded DNA is actually how your immune system already recognizes a viral infection, when it's detected it sets of a cascade of events that should ultimately end in the cells elimination. The way most viruses beat the immune system response is by blocking or attacking one or more of the cascaded steps before cell death. This protein shortcuts all of those steps and makes the jump straight from detection of double stranded DNA to triggered cell suicide, there was a fancy word for it that I can't remember.

In short the only mutation that would result in resistance/immunity would be for the virus to no longer cause double stranded DNA to be created. Which is a mutation that likely would have happened already if it's possible, as it would completely avoid the immune systems response.

But where does that leave our immune systems?

[PCM2]

I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.

A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.

This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.

So to put it bluntly, in a world where everybody pops a few anti-flu pills every time they get a little sniffle, what does the human immune system do all day? I can see two possible outcomes:

1. 1. Humans mature with improperly-tuned immune systems that overreact to fairly minor variations, resulting in an increased instance of allergies and autoimmune diseases. (We seem to already be seeing some of this now, with the overuse of antibiotics and antimicrobial agents in soaps etc.)
2. 2. If the side effects of #1 are sufficiently bad for humans, it seems logical that over time, nature will select for people who have weaker overall immune systems. Can that be good?

Re:But where does that leave our immune systems?

[PCM2]

So there would be 'free floating' and live viruses that your immune system would deal with.

Not really. A virus enters a cell, uses cell material to replicate, then the replicated viruses leave the cell in search of new cells to infect. Kill the cell, kill the virus, no replication, no more free-floating virus. This treatment could work very, very quickly.

AFAIK the only way the body can cure a virus once it goes totally rampant inside of your cells is to overheat to the point that it doesn't kill you but it kills the virus (Fever)

Nobody really knows the reason for fever. It might have that effect, but it's unlikely, because (for example) you need to heat water all the way to boiling for it to be effective in sterilizing medical equipment. The increased heat may increase the rate of certain chemical reactions, however. It's also possible that the purpose of fever is simply to disable you, so your body can concentrate on fighting the infection.

Neither do most viruses go "totally rampant," so I don't know why you mention it. TFA talks about this drug being used to treat influenza and the common cold. When is the last time a common cold virus went "totally rampant" in your body?

So to answer your original question: This can only be an incredibly good thing if it works as advertised.

On what do you base that? True, any miracle cure would be a good thing if it worked as advertised. But none of your statements about vaccines and antibodies answers the question of what happens when we don't rely on antibodies to cure vaccines, but instead take a medicine that interrupts the virus replication cycle. If we never allow a virus to take hold in our bodies long enough to require a full immune response, do we not risk maturing with untrained immune systems that attack our own bodies in the absence of pathogens?

On the other hand, now that I think about it, such a treatment really could be a miracle cure for HIV/AIDS patients and others with compromised immune systems, for whom an influenza infection really can be a huge deal.

Re:But where does that leave our immune systems?

[robotkid]

I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.

A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.

This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.

>

It's been noted by other posters, but this treatment is just amping up what the cell would normally do if it detected a viral infection, that is, kill itself to save the host. It turns out most successful viruses have evolved a way to shut off this response, and this treatment is like adding a redundant way to activate it. That's not to say it couldn't backfire, most of these self-destruct pathways need to be activated by multiple inputs to avoid accidental triggering (just like needing two special keys to be pressed at once to launch a nuke), and now it's replaced by one giant shiny red button.

As for weakening our immune system, I should add It's a common misconception that the adaptive immune system provides the bulk of our body's defense from invasions (i.e. the one that can "learn" from vaccinations and infections). In fact the first line of defense is the innate immune system which is what is protecting us 99% of the time, and the naturally occurring suicide pathways alluded to before (apoptosis) are a last-line of defense - neither of these are systems with any capability to "learn" from an infection and therefore they won't get weaker just because we use them less should such treatments prove effective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system

Re:But where does that leave our immune systems?

[GryMor]

It's possible, going by the mechanism being used, that it turns every viral infection you get while on it into the equivalent of a (possibly weak) deactivated virus vaccine. In fact, if it didn't, it probably wouldn't work at all, as it's unlikely it can kill all the infected cells before they have done any viral replication work.

Re:Not sufficent

[geekoid]

Bullshit.. as has been seen time and time again.

The self interest of a CEO to personally gain billions outweighs their desire to see their competitors make money.

Of course, a person with the brains like yours is bound to jump to the first knee jerk reaction and not think or actually study the industry they are talking about.

Moderators: Please mod down.

[digitalderbs]

This is not correct. HIV, like the flu virus, has a single-stranded RNA genome that forms long helical, double stranded RNA structures which could be inhibited by this drug (DRACOs). See table 1 from the article, and my previous post

Published in PLoS One???

[Fished]

Call me when it's been published in NEJM, or JAMA or The Lancet. PLoS ONE is peer reviewed, kind of, but it's an "open access journal" and not exactly where you'd look for something of this magnitude. I'd imagine there are some serious problems if they couldn't get it published in one of the mainstream journals.

Re:I am Legend?

[AK Marc]

Knowledge on the evolution of viruses is nearly non existent. The selection of bacteria is well documented, but it's presumed that there was no evolution, but that drug resistant strains pre-dated the drugs, and the drugs killed the "normal" ones, allowing the resistant strains to grow unimpeded.

Big deal...

[jonwil]

I have learned to ignore anything about new medical discoveries until the drug in question is available from my local doctor, hospital or chemist.

Just because "drug x" does good things in rats or labs or even monkey/human trials doesn't mean its going to be available for normal people any time soon, if ever (think about all the instances where a promising drug came about and then never made it to market because of side effects)

We do that here in the US

[rsilvergun]

hand out antibiotics for colds that is. Plus we get another fun side effect of private medicine: people hoarding their antibiotics. Just about every poor person I know stops taking their antibiotics as soon as they feel better. Conventional wisdom says they just forgot. They didn't. They're saving them for the next time they (or their family) get sick because they can't afford the co pay to see a doctor & get a prescription (or they can't afford the time off, you can't take FMLA an infection). So as soon as they feel OK they stop taking the pills, and instead of the bacteria being wiped out they grow back stronger. Viva la private medicine!