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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[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?

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: Wow, just wow.

[dtmos]

If Slashdot impresses you, try EurekAlert.

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?

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