The Associated Press is reporting that the Yahoo Board decided not to pay Marissa Mayer her annual cash bonus. Her message was sent out after that point requesting that the money, that she now isn't receiving, be distributed to Yahoo employees. The board has not yet decided to honor her request.
Mayer did offer to also relinquish her stock award, which the board apparently accepted. So she has that going for her.
This is still at the basic biology stage and if you look at their viability figures it does look like the drug is showing some toxicity (15% or so?) in uninfected cells. I'd guess even ready in 10 years would be pretty optimistic.
But honestly how many times is one person going to need the cure for HIV?
The problem is more that the construct is basically the same for every virus to be targeted. So you take it to treat HIV, hepititis, pandemic flu etc. And when you use it to treat one of these you probably aren't becoming immune to the disease in question so someone might get HIV a second/third time (because some people are idiots). However, sensitivity might develop the second or third time it is used for anything.
HIV is sort of a special case though since it suppresses the immune system. Humoral response would be B-cells but they might not activate properly with the T-cells wiped out.
Anyhow, this is all hypothetical. Actually getting these proteins into cells in a human is a lot harder than getting them into cells on a plate.
Oh come on... PLoS ONE peer review is as good as anywhere else (which sadly is still pretty bad). The only thing odd about PLoS ONE is the don't really filter based on impact or field. Also, plenty of quality journals are open access (Lancet), delayed open access (NEJM) or allow authors to pay for the privilege of their paper being freely available. I don't see how that casts the veracity of the article into doubt.
That said, I agree, the fact that a paper the purports to be so ground breaking was submitted to a fairly low impact journal is a little fishy. It seems a bit premature for NEJM, JAMA, or Lancet given that the work was with mouse cancer lines and lung fibroblasts (possibly others), but I would have expected Science, Nature or Cell. I read through the paper and it seems decently solid, they do seem to have a bit of toxicity and the cells were pretreated with the drug in a bunch of the graphs so the data doesn't really represent a viral 'cure'.
Did anyone notice anything else that might have caused them to aim low?
I can think of a few mutations/adaptions that might work.
One of the simplest would be for viruses to acquire, possibly from the treatment, an inactive chunk of the drug/protein. If this chunk is secreted it may induce an antigenic response against an epitope on the peptide. The end result is that the host would develop a humoral response against the drug, coating it in antibodies and blocking its activity. Honestly, the virus might not need to do anything, people might just develop a sensitivity if they get injected a few times.
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The Associated Press is reporting that the Yahoo Board decided not to pay Marissa Mayer her annual cash bonus. Her message was sent out after that point requesting that the money, that she now isn't receiving, be distributed to Yahoo employees. The board has not yet decided to honor her request. Mayer did offer to also relinquish her stock award, which the board apparently accepted. So she has that going for her.
But honestly how many times is one person going to need the cure for HIV?
The problem is more that the construct is basically the same for every virus to be targeted. So you take it to treat HIV, hepititis, pandemic flu etc. And when you use it to treat one of these you probably aren't becoming immune to the disease in question so someone might get HIV a second/third time (because some people are idiots). However, sensitivity might develop the second or third time it is used for anything. HIV is sort of a special case though since it suppresses the immune system. Humoral response would be B-cells but they might not activate properly with the T-cells wiped out. Anyhow, this is all hypothetical. Actually getting these proteins into cells in a human is a lot harder than getting them into cells on a plate.
Oh come on... PLoS ONE peer review is as good as anywhere else (which sadly is still pretty bad). The only thing odd about PLoS ONE is the don't really filter based on impact or field. Also, plenty of quality journals are open access (Lancet), delayed open access (NEJM) or allow authors to pay for the privilege of their paper being freely available. I don't see how that casts the veracity of the article into doubt. That said, I agree, the fact that a paper the purports to be so ground breaking was submitted to a fairly low impact journal is a little fishy. It seems a bit premature for NEJM, JAMA, or Lancet given that the work was with mouse cancer lines and lung fibroblasts (possibly others), but I would have expected Science, Nature or Cell. I read through the paper and it seems decently solid, they do seem to have a bit of toxicity and the cells were pretreated with the drug in a bunch of the graphs so the data doesn't really represent a viral 'cure'. Did anyone notice anything else that might have caused them to aim low?
I can think of a few mutations/adaptions that might work. One of the simplest would be for viruses to acquire, possibly from the treatment, an inactive chunk of the drug/protein. If this chunk is secreted it may induce an antigenic response against an epitope on the peptide. The end result is that the host would develop a humoral response against the drug, coating it in antibodies and blocking its activity. Honestly, the virus might not need to do anything, people might just develop a sensitivity if they get injected a few times.