Actually, it's a little trickier than that. Worms have to be microinjected. But that hasn't stopped people from trying to make worm engineering widely accessible. This is the seminal work on the topic, I believe.
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That's the idea. As it so happens, I dug up more of the article, and it looks like their custom receptor targets the kind of B cell that mutates into a diseased state in this particular form of leukaemia. In essence, they're skipping the check against the whitelist that's supposed to prevent these receptors from reaching maturity. The patients actually lost all of those B cells as a result, but by programming their custom T cells with a means of triggering self-destruction, they could easily reintroduce a healthy population. Et voilà—everything back to normal.
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I get to post this link again, hooray! The randomness comes from chopping up a very long segment of DNA in a couple of arbitrarily-chosen places. There are only about 25 million possible combinations... and the body also has a bunch of mechanisms for detecting and protecting native molecules, like this thing.
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I was going to write an excited post about this, but further reading of the article has made me a little more sceptical. What the researchers did was create a kind of autoimmune disease, where their engineered T cells targeted and destroyed a subset of the patients' B cells. It's important to note that all of these cells were circulating in the blood, where the cancerous cells were easy to access; this technique probably would not work well against tumours, especially since it appears to wipe out the subset of non-cancerous B cells from which the cancer line had originated. If this technique were applied directly to, say, lung cancer, it would destroy all of whatever lung tissue had become cancerous. It's also left the patients with an immune deficiency.
That being said, the leukaemia they treated is extremely common amongst cancer patients, and, in this case, it would be possible to fix the immune deficiency by adding a self-destruct switch to the T cells, and reintroducing healthy B cells, so the body can be put back to normal once the cancer is definitely defeated.
Prior to this, we had no good way of treating blood leukaemia. Traditional chemotherapy relies on poisoning all fast-reproducing cells, which does huge damage to the immune system, intestinal lining, and hair follicles. Further, bone marrow transplants are often required to restore blood cell production afterwards. It looks like this technique was tried previously, but abandoned due to failures. So things are looking up—but other forms of cancer are still likely to be a part of life for a long time yet!
It's kind of in beta; up until a few hours ago I had a bad joke about regular expressions instead ("How did the regex cross the road?" "^.*$"). Any suggestions on improvements will be gracefully accepted!
I suppose that works too. But I think I like a gas can analogy better: "it's not an acid barrel, we emptied it and filled it with a mixture of premium unleaded fuel and engine cleaner."
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Here's part of your answer. There are only about twenty-five million possible naturally-occurring receptors. The other part of your answer lies squarely in the journal article's abstract: the antigen targeted naturally occurs in a subset of the body's B cells, and they ended up killing those off in the process of defeating the cancer.
Kind of a big problem, yeah. But I'm guessing the Bluetooth headset would be there to work around that.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 2
It's not a few leeches; it's widespread. Hiding under the label of cancer research is how the biological sciences protected themselves from budget cuts. A lot of really vital and scientifically significant research is still being done, even though the politicians think the money is going solely to problems that directly relate to cancer. The lines are extremely blurry, as it so happens, because the corruptions of the cell reproductive cycle that lead to cancer are so fantastically complex.
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 5, Informative
That's actually a misrepresentation in the MSNBC article. I've pored over the original paper a little bit more now, and actually the researchers didn't add anything specific to trigger multiplication. Also, they weren't macrophages, which is what most people think of when they hear 'white blood cells'—they were T cells. T cells target one specific molecule, and if they find that molecule, then the body tells that T cell to reproduce. The thousand-fold growth was actually the body's way of saying "hey, I found an infection!" and dealing with it normally. The levels subsided on their own after the cancer was gone, as with any manageable disease.
T cell receptors (the things that stick out of T cells which allow them to detect their prey) are incredible biologically because the body makes them up at semi-random when generating new T cells; it does the same for antibodies. However, we only have so many building blocks to choose from when making them, and the receptors we need to target leukaemia aren't possible. It's conceivable that a random mutation could allow someone to develop a resistance to cancer naturally, but that could potentially come at the cost of effective protection against many other diseases.
You seem like the sort of person who might appreciate the explanation for how HIV was actually involved, so have some superfluous, unsolicited education.
There are two major kinds of molecules inside of cells that have functional value: enzymes and nucleic acids (including DNA). Enzymes are little machines that can perform almost any task if they're built properly, and nucleic acids contain blueprints for building enzymes (and other molecules.) Viruses like HIV work by injecting new blueprints into the cell, and tricking the cell into building the enzymes that those nucleic acids describe. Usually, this payload just consists of "make more copies of the virus", and the cell is forced to run those instructions until it explodes or dies due to poor self-maintenance.
Viruses have been used in biology for a long time. At first, before we could read DNA directly, we used dysfunctional viruses to copy random bacterial genes in a shotgun approach to try and find out which genes were next to each other. Later, when we had more control over viruses, we started removing the nucleic acids from them completely, and loading them up with new blueprints. It's very hard to get DNA into mature animal cells; they've evolved extensively with the explicit aim of preventing it. Viruses are kind of like network worms, in that respect: they find a means of breaking into the cell, exploit it, and then make the cell run a program to spread. But a single viral particle can only infect one cell, once. After the blueprints have been ejected from it, it's an empty husk.
In genetic engineering, though, we remove all of the material required for duplication. The cell is never told to produce new copies of the virus, because the payload never contained any instructions to do so—only some other blueprints cooked up by the researchers.
In this case, HIV was chosen simply because it's well-studied and very effective at breaking into immune system cells. At no point were the patients ever in danger, and under no circumstances could the virus ever have reproduced, because, in this case, it was just a container for their gene construct.
Re:Does "gene therapy" have such a bad name...
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 1
It does on Slashdot.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The amount of money that goes into cancer research, and pet projects pork-barrelled as cancer research, greatly overshadows all other medical and biological research budgets. I used to work on a lab that did neurodevelopmental studies in itty-bitty worms called C. elegans. It was, in large part, funded by the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute. The end of cancer research funding would utterly destroy fundamental research in molecular biology and biochemistry.
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Biological viruses are very much like old-school computer viruses in that they have two parts:
1. inject code (genes) into programs (cells)
2. get executed by system (cells) and create copy of self that can infect more programs/cells.
In genetic engineering, using viruses as a transport mechanism is extremely common, because they're often easier to alter than affecting cells directly. They have far simpler internal states. In the case of this experiment, HIV was just used as a carrier for a genetic construct (a bunch of code) designed by the researchers. Absolutely no HIV DNA was transferred, and so there's absolutely no risk of HIV infection: after the viral DNA is inserted into the cell, you just get an empty, lifeless capsule made out of inert protein polymers. Using HIV happened to be desirable because its machinery is very good at infecting.
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I am an expert on this. The HIV was used as a transport mechanism to modify the DNA of the white blood cells. It's identical to using a computer virus to deliver a kernel patch instead of self-replicating code. Retroviral engineering is extremely common in biology. The critical point is that the virus has had all of its self-replicating machinery removed in advance. No HIV genes were transferred into the white blood cells; only a payload designed by the researchers.
Please, for the love of all that is holy, tell all your friends. Especially if you're friends with Taco. The amount of ignorance on Slashdot about biological concepts that are directly analogous to computer concepts is staggering.
The notion of self-interested genes is a bit of a stretch. First, you probably mean allele (a specific state of a gene, such as "defective haemoglobin alpha subunit that causes sickle-cell anaemia" versus "non-defective haemoglobin alpha subunit"), and second, describing alleles (or even whole genes) as competing for success, even ignoring the whole we're-really-just-goo-kicking-around-for-no-reason conversation, is ascribing too much independence to individual genes. It would be better to say that an organism's genome competes as a group to survive; the entire genotype is cooperating, after all.
Of course, a few caveats: 1. sexually-reproductive organisms give up personal fidelity in the hope that the best combinations of available organisms will survive, 2. many species of bacteria share genes randomly using various horizontal gene transfer techniques, 3. transposons, which really are self-interested genetic elements, proving that anything can happen, and 4. the defective haemoglobin alpha subunit that causes sickle-cell anaemia.
With the exception of transposons and some archaeans and bacteria, most species are now at the point where they have mechanisms in place to shift genes around such that each successive generation does not simply get a copy of its mother's DNA. Sexual reproduction, plasmids, transduction, conjugation... the list of strategies goes on. And messing things up further, we have diseases like sickle-cell that are beneficial under certain circumstances (sickle-cell confers resistance to malaria if you're a carrier.) What living organisms actually do is protect and support those whom they consider similar enough to themselves—and even some outside of that group, if they're beneficial to their own group's survival, in the case of symbiosis. Bacteria and archaeans do it through senseless altruism; we do it through the elaborate neurochemical dance that is love—all forms of it. So... yeah.
In all seriousness, it's something along the lines of the sixth question I've received about it. Besides; if Apollo had meant for us to have only one signature, it would be declared final.
There is absolutely no good reason for a teenager to be working up until or after midnight; homework and being well-rested for school are incompatible with a job that late in the evening.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's a little trickier than that. Worms have to be microinjected. But that hasn't stopped people from trying to make worm engineering widely accessible. This is the seminal work on the topic, I believe.
That's the idea. As it so happens, I dug up more of the article, and it looks like their custom receptor targets the kind of B cell that mutates into a diseased state in this particular form of leukaemia. In essence, they're skipping the check against the whitelist that's supposed to prevent these receptors from reaching maturity. The patients actually lost all of those B cells as a result, but by programming their custom T cells with a means of triggering self-destruction, they could easily reintroduce a healthy population. Et voilà—everything back to normal.
I get to post this link again, hooray! The randomness comes from chopping up a very long segment of DNA in a couple of arbitrarily-chosen places. There are only about 25 million possible combinations... and the body also has a bunch of mechanisms for detecting and protecting native molecules, like this thing.
I was going to write an excited post about this, but further reading of the article has made me a little more sceptical. What the researchers did was create a kind of autoimmune disease, where their engineered T cells targeted and destroyed a subset of the patients' B cells. It's important to note that all of these cells were circulating in the blood, where the cancerous cells were easy to access; this technique probably would not work well against tumours, especially since it appears to wipe out the subset of non-cancerous B cells from which the cancer line had originated. If this technique were applied directly to, say, lung cancer, it would destroy all of whatever lung tissue had become cancerous. It's also left the patients with an immune deficiency.
That being said, the leukaemia they treated is extremely common amongst cancer patients, and, in this case, it would be possible to fix the immune deficiency by adding a self-destruct switch to the T cells, and reintroducing healthy B cells, so the body can be put back to normal once the cancer is definitely defeated.
Prior to this, we had no good way of treating blood leukaemia. Traditional chemotherapy relies on poisoning all fast-reproducing cells, which does huge damage to the immune system, intestinal lining, and hair follicles. Further, bone marrow transplants are often required to restore blood cell production afterwards. It looks like this technique was tried previously, but abandoned due to failures. So things are looking up—but other forms of cancer are still likely to be a part of life for a long time yet!
It's kind of in beta; up until a few hours ago I had a bad joke about regular expressions instead ("How did the regex cross the road?" "^.*$"). Any suggestions on improvements will be gracefully accepted!
I suppose that works too. But I think I like a gas can analogy better: "it's not an acid barrel, we emptied it and filled it with a mixture of premium unleaded fuel and engine cleaner."
True, true—hopefully we'll fix that too!
Signatures truly are a powerful medium, it seems.
Here's part of your answer. There are only about twenty-five million possible naturally-occurring receptors. The other part of your answer lies squarely in the journal article's abstract: the antigen targeted naturally occurs in a subset of the body's B cells, and they ended up killing those off in the process of defeating the cancer.
Kind of a big problem, yeah. But I'm guessing the Bluetooth headset would be there to work around that.
It's not a few leeches; it's widespread. Hiding under the label of cancer research is how the biological sciences protected themselves from budget cuts. A lot of really vital and scientifically significant research is still being done, even though the politicians think the money is going solely to problems that directly relate to cancer. The lines are extremely blurry, as it so happens, because the corruptions of the cell reproductive cycle that lead to cancer are so fantastically complex.
That's actually a misrepresentation in the MSNBC article. I've pored over the original paper a little bit more now, and actually the researchers didn't add anything specific to trigger multiplication. Also, they weren't macrophages, which is what most people think of when they hear 'white blood cells'—they were T cells. T cells target one specific molecule, and if they find that molecule, then the body tells that T cell to reproduce. The thousand-fold growth was actually the body's way of saying "hey, I found an infection!" and dealing with it normally. The levels subsided on their own after the cancer was gone, as with any manageable disease.
T cell receptors (the things that stick out of T cells which allow them to detect their prey) are incredible biologically because the body makes them up at semi-random when generating new T cells; it does the same for antibodies. However, we only have so many building blocks to choose from when making them, and the receptors we need to target leukaemia aren't possible. It's conceivable that a random mutation could allow someone to develop a resistance to cancer naturally, but that could potentially come at the cost of effective protection against many other diseases.
Alas! If only I had known about it beforehand. I will use this rendition in the future. Thank you.
You seem like the sort of person who might appreciate the explanation for how HIV was actually involved, so have some superfluous, unsolicited education.
There are two major kinds of molecules inside of cells that have functional value: enzymes and nucleic acids (including DNA). Enzymes are little machines that can perform almost any task if they're built properly, and nucleic acids contain blueprints for building enzymes (and other molecules.) Viruses like HIV work by injecting new blueprints into the cell, and tricking the cell into building the enzymes that those nucleic acids describe. Usually, this payload just consists of "make more copies of the virus", and the cell is forced to run those instructions until it explodes or dies due to poor self-maintenance.
Viruses have been used in biology for a long time. At first, before we could read DNA directly, we used dysfunctional viruses to copy random bacterial genes in a shotgun approach to try and find out which genes were next to each other. Later, when we had more control over viruses, we started removing the nucleic acids from them completely, and loading them up with new blueprints. It's very hard to get DNA into mature animal cells; they've evolved extensively with the explicit aim of preventing it. Viruses are kind of like network worms, in that respect: they find a means of breaking into the cell, exploit it, and then make the cell run a program to spread. But a single viral particle can only infect one cell, once. After the blueprints have been ejected from it, it's an empty husk.
In genetic engineering, though, we remove all of the material required for duplication. The cell is never told to produce new copies of the virus, because the payload never contained any instructions to do so—only some other blueprints cooked up by the researchers.
In this case, HIV was chosen simply because it's well-studied and very effective at breaking into immune system cells. At no point were the patients ever in danger, and under no circumstances could the virus ever have reproduced, because, in this case, it was just a container for their gene construct.
It does on Slashdot.
The amount of money that goes into cancer research, and pet projects pork-barrelled as cancer research, greatly overshadows all other medical and biological research budgets. I used to work on a lab that did neurodevelopmental studies in itty-bitty worms called C. elegans. It was, in large part, funded by the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute. The end of cancer research funding would utterly destroy fundamental research in molecular biology and biochemistry.
Biological viruses are very much like old-school computer viruses in that they have two parts:
1. inject code (genes) into programs (cells)
2. get executed by system (cells) and create copy of self that can infect more programs/cells.
In genetic engineering, using viruses as a transport mechanism is extremely common, because they're often easier to alter than affecting cells directly. They have far simpler internal states. In the case of this experiment, HIV was just used as a carrier for a genetic construct (a bunch of code) designed by the researchers. Absolutely no HIV DNA was transferred, and so there's absolutely no risk of HIV infection: after the viral DNA is inserted into the cell, you just get an empty, lifeless capsule made out of inert protein polymers. Using HIV happened to be desirable because its machinery is very good at infecting.
I am an expert on this. The HIV was used as a transport mechanism to modify the DNA of the white blood cells. It's identical to using a computer virus to deliver a kernel patch instead of self-replicating code. Retroviral engineering is extremely common in biology. The critical point is that the virus has had all of its self-replicating machinery removed in advance. No HIV genes were transferred into the white blood cells; only a payload designed by the researchers.
Please, for the love of all that is holy, tell all your friends. Especially if you're friends with Taco. The amount of ignorance on Slashdot about biological concepts that are directly analogous to computer concepts is staggering.
Maybe you should try Eudora or Thunderbird? ;)
The notion of self-interested genes is a bit of a stretch. First, you probably mean allele (a specific state of a gene, such as "defective haemoglobin alpha subunit that causes sickle-cell anaemia" versus "non-defective haemoglobin alpha subunit"), and second, describing alleles (or even whole genes) as competing for success, even ignoring the whole we're-really-just-goo-kicking-around-for-no-reason conversation, is ascribing too much independence to individual genes. It would be better to say that an organism's genome competes as a group to survive; the entire genotype is cooperating, after all.
Of course, a few caveats: 1. sexually-reproductive organisms give up personal fidelity in the hope that the best combinations of available organisms will survive, 2. many species of bacteria share genes randomly using various horizontal gene transfer techniques, 3. transposons, which really are self-interested genetic elements, proving that anything can happen, and 4. the defective haemoglobin alpha subunit that causes sickle-cell anaemia.
With the exception of transposons and some archaeans and bacteria, most species are now at the point where they have mechanisms in place to shift genes around such that each successive generation does not simply get a copy of its mother's DNA. Sexual reproduction, plasmids, transduction, conjugation... the list of strategies goes on. And messing things up further, we have diseases like sickle-cell that are beneficial under certain circumstances (sickle-cell confers resistance to malaria if you're a carrier.) What living organisms actually do is protect and support those whom they consider similar enough to themselves—and even some outside of that group, if they're beneficial to their own group's survival, in the case of symbiosis. Bacteria and archaeans do it through senseless altruism; we do it through the elaborate neurochemical dance that is love—all forms of it. So... yeah.
A Stuxnet? In my PLC?
It's more likely thank you think! Why would someone write a worm that is targeted at 0.00001% of the user base when they can target 90?
Unpatched vulnerabilities leave open doors for custom-tailored villainy. I would call it a pretty big deal.
I could be wrong here, but I believe it's actually generally suspected at this point that the chemical basis for life is rather common outside of our planet and outside of our solar system. This brings to mind certain ideas about the nature of our universe which are kind of interesting, if a little ambitious.
I think I may just take you up on that—regardless of whether or not it keeps falling flat.
But that being said, there are plenty of other esoteric jokes about as deserving of sig-space.
In all seriousness, it's something along the lines of the sixth question I've received about it. Besides; if Apollo had meant for us to have only one signature, it would be declared final.
There is absolutely no good reason for a teenager to be working up until or after midnight; homework and being well-rested for school are incompatible with a job that late in the evening.