5 ms·
The article doesn’t say it’s “rarely used”. It says it “rarely happens”. It is not supposed to happen: > Frameshifting almost never happens in our cells. It wo
by IAmGraydon 5y ago
The article doesn’t say it’s “rarely used”. It says it “rarely happens”. It is not supposed to happen:
> Frameshifting almost never happens in our cells. It would lead to dysfunctional cellular proteins.
So the drug would disable an aberrant behavior that coronaviruses depend upon to replicate. This doesn’t sound like a bad thing. It’s also why trials exist.
- ampdepolymerase 5y ago"Dysfunctional proteins" is a vast understatement. Too much frameshifting leads to cancer.
- aaron_m04 5y agoI don't see how it could lead to cancer. We are talking about a translation error, not a replication error.
- dnautics 5y agoit could, in theory lead to cancer, but you'd have to be super unlucky. (frameshift -> accidentally leads to some sort of oncogene agonist)
- pygy_ 5y agoEven then, frame shifts are one off events, so you’d end up with a single instance of an oncogene that would quickly get recycled.
- dnautics 5y agoexactly. Don't know about quickly. Half lives of single proteins can be highly variable. You can have a single protein live long enough to destroy an entire cell (ricin); it evades degradation by not having many lysines and never being ubiquitinated.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- roenxi 5y agoThere is a level of confidence in your post which is wholly unwarranted given how complicated the human body is. There is no design committee at work here, nobody is telling any body what the bits are supposed to do. It is all evolutionary equilibriums. The point of this drug is to shut the coronavirus down to the point where it cannot restart; it is not at all out of the question that something obscure but important in the human body uses the same mechanism and would similarly be permanently disabled. New technologies are all very well, but this is not the sort of approach that should be rolled out in an emergency. If someone has 10 years of safety data from some trial and can put their hand on their heart to swear there are no suspicions of a problem then that is one thing, but otherwise there is no way this approach is safe for an emergency mass deployment. It probably won't be relevant for the current pandemic.
- ithkuil 5y agoNot disagreeing on the caution angle. But, let's imagine we find, by the usual trial and error, a chemical compound whose effects are that of curing patients from the coronavirus. Trials show that it has some rare side effects, like many other drugs. How much do we need to "understand" its first, second and third (and fourth) order effects before deciding to use it?
- roenxi 5y agoIn this case it is using an unproven mechanism that requires proof of a negative ("nothing important in the body uses this mechanism"). It cannot be done safely and quickly. Just because someone survives 12 months and feels fine doesn't tell us anything about the safety of that mechanism. We could literally be injecting people with HIV and it'd only be showing "rare side effects" for the first 12 months as far as symptoms go.
- xorfish 5y agoI don't think that the idea is to disable it forever.
- 5y ago