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How come, since we know so much, not produce a mechanism that counteracts the virus? how come we only know how to tell the immune system how to react? As a pro

How come, since we know so much, not produce a mechanism that counteracts the virus? how come we only know how to tell the immune system how to react? As a programmer, I suddenly got an urge to learn how I can program proteins to do the stuff I want to do. From reading material around proteins, it seems they are nothing more than mechanical devices.

hayderado 6y ago
LOL I had the same reaction, let's program our way out of it. Problem is thought those medical devices aren't as cheap as a MacBook!
dennis_jeeves 6y ago
>How come, since we know so much, not produce a mechanism that counteracts the virus? how come we only know how to tell the immune system how to react? I suspect that the reality is that they do not know much, all the rendering/animation give an impression of sophistication and knowledge. Basically deceit.
rocha 6y ago
Take a look at how mRNA vaccines work, and how they came to be. It is still mind-blowing to me.
- ksk 6y ago
  Its a fairly old concept, but we're still not at the stage where it can be used in a product for human use. I work in vaccine r&d (though not as a scientist) and there are many technologies that sound great on paper, but haven't been shown to work in the real world.
gizmo686 6y ago
It is quite easy to counteract the virus. The challenge is not causing more collateral damage to the body in the process. We also do have other mechanisms. One of the simplest treatments is convalescent plasma, where you take blood plasma from people who have recovered from a virus (and presumably have antibodies) and give it to an infected patient. This is not telling the immune system how to react in the way a vaccine does; it is bypassing the immune system to provide anti-bodies directly (of course, after the anti-bodies attach, normal immune system responses take over). A team of Isreali scientiest have produced artificial anti-bodies that serve the same function without relying on someone else's immune system to produce [0]. There are also a host of anti-viral drugs designed to interfere with with various processes used by virus. For instance, ribavarin resembles adenoside, which is a one of the building blocks of RNA. It can therefore inject itself into the virus's RNA during replication and cause fatal mutations in the virus. > it seems they are nothing more than mechanical devices. Chemical devices would probably be more accurate. Even determining what shape they have is an difficult computation problem (protein folding). Even if you know that, you have to consider how it would interact with every other chemical process in the body that it comes into contact with. [0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200505/Israeli-scientists-discover-monoclonal-antibody-that-neutralizes-SARS-CoV-2.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200505/Israeli-scientist...
cowboysauce 6y ago
> How come, since we know so much, not produce a mechanism that counteracts the virus? The virus hijacks existing cellular mechanisms for its own purposes. Interfering with those mechanisms could halt the replication of the virus, but it could also kill you. As an example, the virus enters cells through the use of the ACE2 protein. That protein plays a part in regulating blood pressure, so you can imagine the danger that could come from doing playing around with that. However, SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and its genome codes for an RNA polymerase enzyme that copies its RNA genome. Human cells do not use RNA polymerase and so it could be a target for a drug. This is how remdesivir works, but you have to find a compound that can effectively interfere, but that isn't too incidentally toxic to humans. > I suddenly got an urge to learn how I can program proteins to do the stuff I want to do. From reading material around proteins, it seems they are nothing more than mechanical devices. Good luck, I'd argue that our ability to design functional, non-trivial proteins de novo is essentially non-existent. The function of a protein is highly dependent of its shape and the process of how a string of amino acids folds into the final shape of the protein is extremely complicated and requires supercomputers to simulate. Not to mention that proteins may require help from another proteins to properly fold. Proteins may also be modified after they have folded and a lot of proteins require things like metal ions or other cofactors to actually be functional.

hayderado 6y ago

LOL I had the same reaction, let's program our way out of it. Problem is thought those medical devices aren't as cheap as a MacBook!

dennis_jeeves 6y ago

>How come, since we know so much, not produce a mechanism that counteracts the virus? how come we only know how to tell the immune system how to react? I suspect that the reality is that they do not know much, all the rendering/animation give an impression of sophistication and knowledge. Basically deceit.

rocha 6y ago

Take a look at how mRNA vaccines work, and how they came to be. It is still mind-blowing to me.

ksk 6y ago
Its a fairly old concept, but we're still not at the stage where it can be used in a product for human use. I work in vaccine r&d (though not as a scientist) and there are many technologies that sound great on paper, but haven't been shown to work in the real world.

gizmo686 6y ago

It is quite easy to counteract the virus. The challenge is not causing more collateral damage to the body in the process. We also do have other mechanisms. One of the simplest treatments is convalescent plasma, where you take blood plasma from people who have recovered from a virus (and presumably have antibodies) and give it to an infected patient. This is not telling the immune system how to react in the way a vaccine does; it is bypassing the immune system to provide anti-bodies directly (of course, after the anti-bodies attach, normal immune system responses take over). A team of Isreali scientiest have produced artificial anti-bodies that serve the same function without relying on someone else's immune system to produce [0]. There are also a host of anti-viral drugs designed to interfere with with various processes used by virus. For instance, ribavarin resembles adenoside, which is a one of the building blocks of RNA. It can therefore inject itself into the virus's RNA during replication and cause fatal mutations in the virus. > it seems they are nothing more than mechanical devices. Chemical devices would probably be more accurate. Even determining what shape they have is an difficult computation problem (protein folding). Even if you know that, you have to consider how it would interact with every other chemical process in the body that it comes into contact with. [0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200505/Israeli-scientists-discover-monoclonal-antibody-that-neutralizes-SARS-CoV-2.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200505/Israeli-scientist...

cowboysauce 6y ago

> How come, since we know so much, not produce a mechanism that counteracts the virus? The virus hijacks existing cellular mechanisms for its own purposes. Interfering with those mechanisms could halt the replication of the virus, but it could also kill you. As an example, the virus enters cells through the use of the ACE2 protein. That protein plays a part in regulating blood pressure, so you can imagine the danger that could come from doing playing around with that. However, SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and its genome codes for an RNA polymerase enzyme that copies its RNA genome. Human cells do not use RNA polymerase and so it could be a target for a drug. This is how remdesivir works, but you have to find a compound that can effectively interfere, but that isn't too incidentally toxic to humans. > I suddenly got an urge to learn how I can program proteins to do the stuff I want to do. From reading material around proteins, it seems they are nothing more than mechanical devices. Good luck, I'd argue that our ability to design functional, non-trivial proteins de novo is essentially non-existent. The function of a protein is highly dependent of its shape and the process of how a string of amino acids folds into the final shape of the protein is extremely complicated and requires supercomputers to simulate. Not to mention that proteins may require help from another proteins to properly fold. Proteins may also be modified after they have folded and a lot of proteins require things like metal ions or other cofactors to actually be functional.