7 ms·
DRACOs may be a cure for all viral diseases
- kayhi 10y agoWe're a start up in the science space working with research labs [1]. A big problem is certainly funding, but also how the funding is spent. We are seeing researchers paying 3-4x for the exact same item. [1] https://labspend.com/ https://labspend.com/
- throwaway2016a 10y agoIf he can't find funding but there is a real problem to which the startup has a promising solution, why not try to get acquired by a larger company that does have the means to finish the research?
- jasonkostempski 10y agoWhat if they acquire just to bury it? If there's really something here, he should give Bill Nye a call, he just did a Big Think video talking about how important it is that this type of stuff gets funded, I'm sure he could draw some attention.
- HillRat 10y agoHe doesn't have an equity vehicle for the research -- he needs funds for his university lab, but he's basically at a point where he needs more funding than he can get from public sources, but his work is still considered too speculatove for pharma companies, hence the "valley of death" monicker. Plus, acquisition doesn't mean the research will continue. I consulted with a med-tech startup a few years ago whose founders had, in a prior company, developed a novel adjuvant that was extremely promising in a wide variety of pharmaceutical applications. To commercialize the research, they were going to close a funding deal with a top-5 PE company -- on September 11, 2001. Needless to say, the funding fell through. They ended up selling the IP to a major pharma company, but that company wasn't willing to put the research dollars into proving out the science, so it sits on the shelf to this day.
- ianlevesque 10y agoIsn't Y Combinator itself investing in this type of venture now?
- sharemywin 10y agonot sure why they don't sell "shares" through one of the crowd funding sites. I'd put a $1000 to make a few bucks for possible cure for viral infections but not for a call to researcher.
- jbmorgado 10y agoShares? This is research in progress at the academia, not a company.
- themihai 10y agoI think the question is why he doesn't register a company to sell shares(i.e. IPO). Crowdfunding is nice but not everyone is a philanthropist.
- Beltiras 10y agoEspecially since this avenue leads to profitability for a lucky company who carries it to term.
- sharemywin 10y agoI'm just saying I would put down 50x more if I could make money on it. Does that make me an a probably.
- gus_massa 10y agoHow much do you know about biotechnology? Clinical trials? Do you know the alternative treatments that are under research in other universities? The problem of crowfunding in areas you don't know is that it's very difficult to distinguish between the real research breakthrough and the scams. PS1: "Never invest more than you can afford to loose." PS2: What about investing in a company that can make a blood analysis only with a drop of blood?
- sharemywin 10y ago
- hprotagonist 10y ago98% of the time, "i had a neat idea 15 years ago, but we still need to test it through phase I, II, and III" does _not_ become "I am the man who probably cured all viral infections". and he has exactly one paper, and it's in PlOS One. Yawn.
- colordrops 10y agoAre you aware of ANY other studies that achieved similar results? Even if the probability of it working on humans is low, the results are so amazing that it would be stupid not to pursue it further.
- r0muald 10y agoI don't understand how having that one hypothetical paper published in PLOS One instead of another journal would be negative.
- hprotagonist 10y agoPLOS One is relatively minor-leagues as far as biomed journals go. Hate for impact factors, while perhaps fully justfied, doesn't remove the fact that people act like they matter, and an impact factor of 3.2 is ten times less than Nature or Cell or Science.
- virusduck 10y agoIt's mostly that it doesn't use the typical peer-review process. It is only reviewed for overall soundness of experiments (though there are some bad omissions of controls in this case), not for impact to the field, a compelling story, or even believable results. And this is not meant to be a negative comment by any means, but PLOS ONE is a great place to publish potentially interesting negative results, so that people don't keep trying things that don't work. Anyway, if this was as big as he has trumped it up to be, it wouldn't be in PLOS One, there would be more than one pub, and both the defense department and pharmaceutical companies would be falling over themselves to get this tech developed for humans. It's this kind of false-hope hype ( I CAN CURE EVERYTHING BUT NO ONE WILL GIVE ME MONEY ) makes people sour on science.
- hannob 10y agoI have read a couple of similar stories. While there may be a legit case for funding this work (I don't know the details) one should be aware of one thing: There are a lot of promising preclinical results, and the vast majority never turns into any medical treatment. I think the article completely fails to reflect that and gives the impression that turning this research into a treatment is just a matter of proper funding. As far as I understand there currently only exist a few animal lab studies that indicate this treatment works. Especially in these preclinical settings many studies turn out to be not reproducible. But even if they are, there's a very long way to a treatment in humans.
- api 10y ago> There are a lot of promising preclinical results, and the vast majority never turns into any medical treatment. There are a lot of promising startups and the vast majority fail. Science needs to take a lot more risks, not less, and be willing to fail. If science is now unwilling to take risks or fail, science is over as anything other than a cargo cult built around the science of previous generations.
- pjc50 10y agoGreat! Who's going to pay for those risks to be taken?
- Beltiras 10y agoAnyone, everyone. Crowdfunding science should be done more.
- NikolaeVarius 10y agoSo science will become "throw money at the people who can win a social media popularity contest". How is that any better than what we have now? Everything about it seems worse.
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- rurban 10y agoMaybe the easiest solution is to give the man a Nobel price. Technically it's a breakthrough, and adjusting the method for more viruses is just a matter of funding, which the Nobel price committee is responsible for.
- gus_massa 10y agoI think they only have some studies in mice. And as all the initial research there is a high chance that it will never be safe enough or effective enough to be applied in humans. The Nobel price is usually awarded after the technique is thoughtfully tested and applied for many years, so then try to avoid the current fad.
- quirkot 10y agoDRACO: Drugs Relieving Antigen Class 0
- logfromblammo 10y agoI rolled a 14. Am I cured?
- quirkot 10y agologfromblammo used APSIRIN against INFLUENZA. Attack is successful. INFLUENZA is vanquished. You gained 14 exp.
- agnokapathetic 10y agoTL;DR for DRACOs what it is: they made a poison which will kill a cell when two-parts of the poison touch each other in a certain way (think bubble gum in mission impossible). They've designed the parts of the poison so it should only trigger when a virus is present. why no big pharma compnay will touch it: the criterion for "virus present, KILL CELL" is potentially highly highly error prone, could easily go haywire killing all the cells. Contrast to Immunotherapy -- the state of the art in clinically approved cancer treatments which uses the body's own immune system to selectively kill cancer cells (which also faced significant finanical barriers to its development), even if the signal goes haywire, the body's immune system still has fail-safes to not killing all of its own cells. disclaimer: i am not a biologist, but i took some basic college bio courses From wikipedia: "Differentiation between infected and healthy cells is made primarily via the length and type of RNA transcription helices present within the cell. Most viruses produce long dsRNA helices during transcription and replication. In contrast, uninfected mammalian cells generally produce dsRNA helices of fewer than 24 base pairs during transcription. Cell death is effected via one of the last steps in the apoptosis pathway in which complexes containing intracellular apoptosis signaling molecules simultaneously bind multiple procaspases. The procaspases transactivate via cleavage, activate additional caspases in the cascade, and cleave a variety of cellular proteins, thereby killing the cell." From the paper (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/asset?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022572.PDF http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/asset?id=10.1371%2F...) : "In its simplest form, a DRACO is a chimeric protein with one domain that binds to viral dsRNA and a second domain (e.g., a procaspase-binding domain or a procaspase) that induces apoptosis when two or more DRACOs crosslink on the same dsRNA. If viral dsRNA is present inside a cell, DRACOs will bind to the dsRNA and induce apoptosis of that cell. If viral dsRNA is not present inside the cell, DRACOs will not crosslink and apoptosis will not occur."
- openasocket 10y agoNot a virologist, but this seems over-hyped. There wasn't a lot of info on how DRACO works, but it seems to cause cell destruction on detection of double-stranded RNA, which means it will only work on double-stranded RNA viruses. I'm not sure how many human viral infections are caused by double-stranded RNA viruses, but from skimming the wikipedia page it doesn't seem to be many (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-stranded_RNA_viruses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-stranded_RNA_viruses). The main example the wiki page gives is rotaviruses, which do cause a lot of deaths of children in developing countries, but there is a vaccine available. The fact that he explicitly is saying this could treat ALL viral diseases makes me skeptical. Maybe I'm wrong, and most viruses produce dsRNA in some form or another during infection.
- samch 10y ago"Most viruses have double- or single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) genomes and produce long dsRNA helices during transcription and replication; the remainder of viruses have DNA genomes and typically produce long dsRNA via symmetrical transcription." http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0022572 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
- openasocket 10y agoAh, I missed that. But which viruses generate dsRNA? Another trip to Google gave me the following paper from the Journal of Virology: "Double-stranded RNA is produced by positive-strand RNA viruses and DNA viruses but not in detectable amounts by negative-strand RNA viruses." (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16641297 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16641297) Assuming this paper is reputable (which I'm not really qualified to determine) that certainly seems to cover a broad category of viruses. If that paper is correct, negative strand RNA viruses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-sense_single-stranded_RNA_virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-sense_single-stranded...) would not be treatable with DRACO. And, according to wikipedia, that category includes Ebola, Rabies, Lassa virus and Hanta virus, which is a little disappointing. But here's the weird part. That wikipedia page also says that Influenza viruses are negative strand RNA viruses, so shouldn't produce dsRNA. But DRACO was tested against H1N1 influenza, and supposedly worked. We have a contradiction. So either the Journal of Virology paper is wrong, wikipedia is wrong is saying that Influenza is a negative strand RNA virus, or DRACO doesn't work against H1N1. Anyone care to offer some insight?
- reasonattlm 10y agoA demonstration that DRACO works in pig cells for a problematic virus, which you should take as less convincing than the existing in vivo mouse studies, but was carried out by another research group not directly affiliated with the original developer: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00705-015-2392-4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00705-015-2392-4 DRACO, double-stranded RNA activated caspase oligomerizer, is a broadly applicable antiviral technology that has been under development at a slow pace for quite some time now. You might recall some publicity back in 2011, for example, but that marked the results of years of earlier work. DRACO attacks infected cells, not the viruses themselves, following the principle of finding a common vulnerability to target rather than trying to tailor therapies to every different variety of attacker. Despite technology demonstrations to show effectiveness against a broad range of very different types of virus, and the fact that this technology can in principle be applied to near any type of virus, there is next to no ongoing funding for DRACO. It stands as an example of the fact that you can build a better mousetrap and still have the world ignore you. In this case DRACO is languishing despite grave concerns regarding spreading viral resistance to existing drugs, and billions devoted to constructing new drugs that are just more of the same. Advocacy and philanthropy are often the only ways forward for a new medical technology that is a radical departure from the present status quo. This is a lesson to keep in mind when we talk about the various branches of medical research. It is hard to obtain funding in the life sciences in any meaningful fashion, and the organization of funding for any ongoing serious effort has become a baroque effort involving many players, all of whom are operating with perverse incentives that only serve to slow down progress and make funding less effective on a dollar for dollar basis. For example the large funding bodies are extremely risk-averse, and thus almost never fund the most important early-stage and high-risk projects, the science that is actually science, at the forefront and involving new discoveries. These funding bodies only ever put money into ongoing development wherein which the researchers can already demonstrate proof of concept and an understanding of the mechanisms involved. Getting to that point for any new line of research requires creative accounting and the help of philanthropic donations, and even so there is far too little actual science taking place in major laboratories.