13 ms·
Perhaps a stupid question, but the article says "HIV has already shown the ability to evolve resistance to all manner of antiviral drugs (as well as the human i
by foota 11y ago
Perhaps a stupid question, but the article says "HIV has already shown the ability to evolve resistance to all manner of antiviral drugs (as well as the human immune system). This happens because its genetic material is copied by enzymes that are prone to error. Most mistakes stop the virus working, but occasionally a mutation is beneficial for HIV, allowing it to evade attack." is it possible to fix the gene copying mechanism in HIV and thereby eliminate its ability to mutate so quickly?
- Retric 11y agoThe problem is not that it will mutate, the problem is it has mutated so your treatment ends up heavily selecting for that mutation.
- mirimir 11y agoReplication with randomness plus selection is just so incredibly powerful.
- pdkl95 11y agoThe problem is reverse transcriptase[1] (the enzyme that causes the copy errors) is a key part of how HIV infects the cell[2]. If we could fix that, we could simply block it from working at all, stopping the virus's ability to copy itself into the cell's chromosome. This is actually how a lot of the HIV drugs work (reverse transcriptase inhibitors[3]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcriptase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcriptase [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS1GODinO8w#t=100 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS1GODinO8w#t=100 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse-transcriptase_inhibitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse-transcriptase_inhibito...
- marshray 11y agoSo then why are retroviruses so relatively rare? Why aren't they the dominant type of virus?
- vdernov 11y agoVarying levels of infectivity are at least one reason why some viruses are easier to get infected by. They work via different mechanisms, like different cellular receptors, and this also plays a role. Etc...
- gozur88 11y agoAre retroviruses rare? From what I can tell we don't know much about viruses that don't clearly cause disease.
- cowsandmilk 11y agoWikipedia claims "Over 8% of the human genome is made up of (mostly decayed) endogenous retrovirus sequences"[1]. So, it appears they are at least common enough that we're all passing along endogenous viral elements[2] to our children (and we got them from our parents). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA#Repeat_sequences.2C_transposons_and_viral_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA#Repeat_sequences... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_viral_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_viral_element
- Cnd_North 11y agoYeah, exactly.. I was thinking the same thing.. Make it not change, and then get rid of it.. But I think there could still be a underlying problem of having the Ca9 T cells to do this to all of the HIV infected cells..