5 ms·

Fascinating to see that they started with the most interesting virus rather than the most commercially valuable virus. Stopping the common cold is probably wor

Fascinating to see that they started with the most interesting virus rather than the most commercially valuable virus. Stopping the common cold is probably worth 100 times more money, but stopping Ebola is more scientifically interesting. Kudos.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ihodes 16y ago
It may have more to do with the fact that monkeys cannot contract rhinovirus. Therefore, no test subjects with moderately similar physiology. That and Ebola is cool.
ars 16y ago
The cold might mutate too fast for this to work well.
celoyd 16y ago
More power to them. But notice they have defense funding. As the article hints, right now, if someone with Ebola got on a plane to Cairo or Johannesburg, billions of people would die. That’s not worth much in the $10 × 1,000,000,000 people way of the common cold, but it will get you enormous government grants and a huge amount of prestige.
- rjurney 16y ago
  Wikipedia makes a city-disaster seem unlikely. It is not much airborne, and isolation-nursing prevents spread.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Unlikely. I just checked the wikipedia article, and the Ebola virus is not naturally transmitted as an aerosol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#Transmission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#Transmission). It is transmitted through bodily fluids, including supertiny droblets but that won't effect more than the ten people closest to the infected person on that plane, and before they have a chance to infect anybody else the worlds medical system will have indentified and dealt with the case. In addition, the virus kills within 2-21 days, so it is unlikely to have time to spread to that many people from each source. Therefore, this won't be the new black death, but that won't stop the media from comming all over the story.
- Maktab 16y ago
  There has actually been a case of an Ebola-carrier travelling by plane to Johannesburg, back during the Gabon outbreak in 1996. The only other person he infected was a nurse who had come into direct contact with some of his blood. She died a short while later, but infected nobody else. Ebola is a frighteningly deadly virus, so this sort of research is very encouraging, but its lack of an aerosol delivery mechanism and its quick mortality cycle both mean that it will likely never cause an epidemic on the scale of Bubonic Plague.
barendt 16y ago
The common cold's actually a tough one. There are so many different viruses that cause "the common cold" and an anti-viral would probably only work on one of them. Just putting together a clinical trial would be incredibly expensive because of the difficulties in picking out patients who have the virus your drug treats while they're still early enough on in their illness to be treatable. I may be wrong, but I thought that there actually were some early phase trials of a drug to treat rhinovirus, but they were stopped because of logistical difficult and expense.
- riahi 16y ago
  The common cold is caused by a variety of viruses and strains that identifying all the possible DNA sequences to target would overwhelm researchers for years. This treatment is incredibly targeted, which requires the exact target DNA sequence of the pathogen to be known, siRNA snippits designed and tested against that sequence, and then for the siRNA to be put into a drug. Ebola was probably chosen because it is a rather stable virus and has only relatively few serotypes.
  - salzberg789 16y ago
    Actually there are over 100 strains of cold viruses, many of which were completely sequenced and reported in a paper in Science last year. But as to why this group of scientists chose Ebola: they have been working on Ebola for over 20 years, so they made that choice long ago. Every human virus has a scientific community of experts who study it.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ihodes 16y ago

It may have more to do with the fact that monkeys cannot contract rhinovirus. Therefore, no test subjects with moderately similar physiology. That and Ebola is cool.

ars 16y ago

The cold might mutate too fast for this to work well.

celoyd 16y ago

More power to them. But notice they have defense funding. As the article hints, right now, if someone with Ebola got on a plane to Cairo or Johannesburg, billions of people would die. That’s not worth much in the $10 × 1,000,000,000 people way of the common cold, but it will get you enormous government grants and a huge amount of prestige.

rjurney 16y ago
Wikipedia makes a city-disaster seem unlikely. It is not much airborne, and isolation-nursing prevents spread.
tomjen3 16y ago
Unlikely. I just checked the wikipedia article, and the Ebola virus is not naturally transmitted as an aerosol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#Transmission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#Transmission). It is transmitted through bodily fluids, including supertiny droblets but that won't effect more than the ten people closest to the infected person on that plane, and before they have a chance to infect anybody else the worlds medical system will have indentified and dealt with the case. In addition, the virus kills within 2-21 days, so it is unlikely to have time to spread to that many people from each source. Therefore, this won't be the new black death, but that won't stop the media from comming all over the story.
Maktab 16y ago
There has actually been a case of an Ebola-carrier travelling by plane to Johannesburg, back during the Gabon outbreak in 1996. The only other person he infected was a nurse who had come into direct contact with some of his blood. She died a short while later, but infected nobody else. Ebola is a frighteningly deadly virus, so this sort of research is very encouraging, but its lack of an aerosol delivery mechanism and its quick mortality cycle both mean that it will likely never cause an epidemic on the scale of Bubonic Plague.

barendt 16y ago

The common cold's actually a tough one. There are so many different viruses that cause "the common cold" and an anti-viral would probably only work on one of them. Just putting together a clinical trial would be incredibly expensive because of the difficulties in picking out patients who have the virus your drug treats while they're still early enough on in their illness to be treatable. I may be wrong, but I thought that there actually were some early phase trials of a drug to treat rhinovirus, but they were stopped because of logistical difficult and expense.

riahi 16y ago
The common cold is caused by a variety of viruses and strains that identifying all the possible DNA sequences to target would overwhelm researchers for years. This treatment is incredibly targeted, which requires the exact target DNA sequence of the pathogen to be known, siRNA snippits designed and tested against that sequence, and then for the siRNA to be put into a drug. Ebola was probably chosen because it is a rather stable virus and has only relatively few serotypes.
- salzberg789 16y ago
  Actually there are over 100 strains of cold viruses, many of which were completely sequenced and reported in a paper in Science last year. But as to why this group of scientists chose Ebola: they have been working on Ebola for over 20 years, so they made that choice long ago. Every human virus has a scientific community of experts who study it.