14 ms·
From MIT, a cure for all viruses?
- Tzunamitom 15y agoWow, is that real? How is this not front page news on every network? This would be as big as the discovery of antibiotics.
- syntaxide 15y agoThis appeared on reddit a few days ago, and the answer to your question is twofold. First, this has not yet undergone human testing. In the history of pharmaceuticals, there have been many drugs that performed favorably in animal testing yet failed in human testing. It is simply too early to tell if this drug will be successful in humans. Secondly, was the idea that eliminating all viruses, as this seems to do, is not the best solution. Our bodies would not get the opportunity to develop resistances in the way the immune system usually does so we would be susceptible to the virus the second time around.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ori_b 15y agoThere are many viruses dangerous enough that humans tend to die instead of developing resistance. I think that is enough reason to want this sort of drug around.
- api 15y agoIt could also make viral gene therapy considerably safer, and generally reduce the potential bioterror risk of having genetics technology around. Even if the drug had nasty side effects, it would be great as a last resort similar to ultra-powerful "atomic bomb" antibiotics.
- ghfgh6tghf 15y agoSo use the drug the second time around, too. It uses a property common to all viruses to work - not something that could be defeated with evolution a lá bacterial infections and antibiotics. Speaking of which, I wonder if this would stop us using bacteriophages for treating bacterial infections. They show a lot of promise, again, because they're not resilient to evolution of their target bacteria, but they are viruses themselves.
- FreeFull 15y agoThis would be great for viruses that the immune system can't get rid of on its own, like herpes or HIV. For stuff like the common cold, it'd probably be best to let the immune system deal with it (same how you wouldn't use antibiotics for a minor bacterial infection).
- wvenable 15y agoThe drug kills the cell but the not virus -- your body still has to do that. Given the way that vaccines work, this is probably not going to have a big effect on immunity.
- nullflux 15y agoI'm missing a bit of the logic here, then. If I kill the cells infected, won't the latent viruses go and infect a different cell anyway? DRACO appears to be a medical scorched-earth policy.
- Symmetry 15y agoNo, viruses aren't just free floating strands of genetic material, they also have a sort of molecular syringe that they use to get through the cell wall and to protect them in the environment outside the cell. The genetic material itself won't be that dangerous after the cell dies.
- wvenable 15y agoWith AIDS, for example, it infects a cell and causes that cell to replicate as many copies of the virus as possible (remember viruses don't replicate on their own). The cell eventually ruptures spreading out more copies of the virus to infect more cells. By killing the infected cell as early as possible, you drastically reduce the number of copies produced.
- nullflux 15y agoI have a basic understanding of how viruses work at the cellular level. The problem is that DRACO doesn't seem to kill the virus; it stops its propagation. There is a big difference in the way it works from a broad-spectrum antibiotic and seems more damaging. Let's say you're really sick with the flu -- that means a lot of cells have that virus. The virus replicates and the cell eventually dies and releases hundreds or thousands of viruses. From how I read this, DRACO stops the process by killing cells that are making the virus once they are infected with the virus. If I don't have an antibody for the virus or I have a bad immune system, DRACO is going to end up killing one cell for every one virus that exists in my circulatory system. DRACO is ineffective on the virus when it is spreading. Yes, it stops the spread so your immune system can catch up, I guess, but what if I'm already really sick?
- crusso 15y agoDRACO made the rounds last fall. Even the article linked to here was from November. It would be interesting for the author (or someone) to do a follow-up to see if the same apathy is still predominant.
- Allaun 15y agoI'm not accepting this real until a respected news network investigates it. That and the fact that they didn't seem to spell check / proof-read it first makes me suspicious.
- Rhapso 15y ago"respected news network" at least from my point of view, this is a bit of an oxymoron, call me paranoid, but I'll take a good peer reviewed academic paper for my facts any day.
- Symmetry 15y agoWait, seriously? I thought you were being sarcastic until I read the second sentence. Mainstream news networks in infamously bad at evaluating the accuracy of scientific research, and often end up reporting ridiculous things even if they're drawing inspiration from valid science. The way to evaluate the validity of normal scientific research is typically to see if any respectable research journal has published it. And as far as I can tell PLOS counts as a respectable journal. Before you really start believing the results you want to look for other people duplicating the results, but publication itself means that yes, this is serious.
- etrain 15y agoThis is pretty cool, but it's so early in the drug -> product process that it's really difficult to get one's hopes up. The article indicates that they're nowhere near clinical trials, which often take 5 years by themselves - and most drugs get weeded out before they even get to this stage.
- roadnottaken 15y agoLink to the original research [PDF]: http://goo.gl/jfAIw http://goo.gl/jfAIw
- falafelman 15y agoEnter Zombies
- TomorrowMars 15y agoOh Draco, you do get your reward for not going over to the dark completely...
- adamgravitis 15y agoThank you for posting this on HN! This is exactly the kind of underreported bleeding-edge engineering I hope to discover on places like HN. It's very easy for mainstream journalists to jump on new technologies once they've been developed, but it's up to engineers and scientists themselves to make exciting potential directions better known.
- Symmetry 15y agoHere's the MITLL press release: http://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html http://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html
- trebor 15y agoBut do we need to cure all viruses? Do we know that all are hostile to humans?
- sp332 15y agoNo, but if you get a really bad viral infection, you don't have to hope that there is a drug around that has been developed to kill that particular disease. You can just take this drug and know that it will cure you.
- Symmetry 15y agoAs far as I'm aware viruses don't do anything positive for humans, though they can swap genes around and so allow bacteria to evolve more quickly. This is in sharp contrast to antibiotics where we really do rely on a huge number of symbiotic bacteria. So it seems that anti-virus drugs are a much safer thing than the antibiotics we already use.
- tim_buck 15y agoHumans have repurposed viral mechanisms for gene therapy, so this is actually untrue. In addition, "germ theory" and early science related to antibiotics and widespread misinformation led people to think all microbes were bad. Now people realize that that we have flora on the outside and inside of our bodies that are helpful and part of our body's ecosystem. Viruses will likely in the future be understood to do more than just hurt us and introduce genetic mutations.
- smogzer 15y agoGo to kickstarter or some other funding method that will NOT patent or copyright this. Something like the JOBS acts would provide. This is too disruptive to have in the hands of big pharma.
- stevejabs 15y agoHonestly, all of the "non-profit" organizations out there who provide "funding" to AIDS research need to blow the bank and get behind something like this.
- tomjen3 15y agoIt is properly too early to tell, but if this proves to be something real, we need a march of dimes founding situation and we have to make it as much a national issue, and as important as when Jonas Salk headed the team that cured polio. One thing it will do is it will cure AIDS -- an insanely great achievement -- another thing it will do is that it will inspire a generation of kids to become scientists, which we sorely need.
- goblin89 15y ago> It is properly too early to tell, but if this proves to be something real “Then there are government agencies and companies that will take it and take it to that final step.” The problem is getting to that stage when it proves to be something real.
- antidaily 15y agoI "agree".
- driverdan 15y agoKickstarter isn't going to provide the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to take a drug through the FDA approval process.
- Ralith 15y ago
- mmj48 15y agoSide note: have mercy on your readers and make the text contrast a bit higher.
- lell 15y agoI read the plos article when it came out. Basically, when a cell realises it is infected with a virus sometimes it will try to kill itself. There are a bunch of checks it does to make sure killing itself is a good idea. Many viruses try to counter these checks. DRACO works by short circuiting the detection -> kill self pathway. It's a great idea. But sometimes a large proportion of cells can get infected when you have a virus. Someone might get in a lot of trouble if all their infected cells instantly died. Like, can anyone speculate what the side effect would be for an AIDS patient? I don't know myself, but I'd want to know more about this before saying this is a miracle cure.
- meow 15y agoSo is DRACO itself a kind of virus ? How does it visit all the cells...
- Symmetry 15y agoDRACO is a drug, and travels through the body by diffusion the same way other drugs do.
- jerf 15y ago"Someone might get in a lot of trouble if all their infected cells instantly died." This was directly addressed in the linked article.
- firefoxman1 15y agoSounds like a perfect beginning to a real "I am Legend" scenario. Imagine someone releasing a virus that could cross the blood-brain barrier (modified Rabies?) that just infects the cells and causes some minor symptoms that appear to be a standard cold. But anyone who takes this drug will have those brain cells self-destruct right?
- Symmetry 15y agoI found the author's contention that the cells were about to be killed by the virus anyways fairly convincing, but this is why we have tests in animals first.
- caycep 15y agoits interesting although one potential twist is that viruses may be more the communications vector for genetic material than the actual disease causing process itself (which is the payload). if this gets widely used in the field, will it disrupt "good" things - evolutionary processes, symbiotic infections, etc? Will it disrupt the ability of manmade viruses (i.e. gene therapy) from working?
- ohashi 15y agoI have no idea but I am curious as well. The one thing that did stick out was he said it only lasted 48 hours in the body. So presumably, if you were doing something after it left the body, it would have no effect (assuming it works as intended).
- vajrabum 15y agoIn the article the idea of bioengineering Draco into the body was mentioned. My understanding is that in the early stages of pregnancy there's some very weird stuff going on in mammals that appears to involve endogenous retro-viruses. It might be that mammals came into being partly as a result of some reptile having a viral infection that got into some sperm or egg cells. That wouldn't be a reason not to use it as a drug, but the world of biology is very weird and the systems are open in a way computers are not. Viruses have been around for a very long time and like bacteria are embedded into the environment in ways that like fish in water we won't notice until they go away.
- ohashi 15y agoAh, I forgot that about that part. It were engineered into us that is an interesting and very different scenario than what I was thinking of (simply taking it to cure/remove/kill viruses)
- Symmetry 15y agoViruses do indeed communicate genetic material between bacteria and contribute to their evolution. Generally humans don't want evolution occurring within our non-gamete cells, when that happens its usually a cancer. Some people have hypothesized that there might be other sorts of symbiotic viruses in humans, but none have been observed so far. On the the other hand we do know of some animals that do have actual symbiotic relationships with viruses[1]. Generally, I imagine that if we give someone manmade viruses we wouldn't give them this drug at the same time. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydnavirus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydnavirus SFW, but don't read the text if you have a weak stomach.
- huxley 15y agoWhen I first saw it I though it was fake. But seriously, PANACEA and DRACO? Is Dr. Todd Rider trolling the crazies? For example: http://youtu.be/EneiDKw_zXg http://youtu.be/EneiDKw_zXg tl;dr: DRACO is attempt by Reptilians to corrupt human DNA, underwater cages, etc
- tomjen3 15y agoOh how insanely great. He makes sure those of us who don't believe that conspiracy gets treatment while those who do are forced to change their minds. Two birds, one stone. Awesome.
- d2vid 15y agoI kept reading the article and looking for something that would give this away as an early April Fools joke.
- nitrogen 15y agoThanks for the tl;dr. I found myself unable to continue listening to the narrator's slow, halting, breathy voice. IMO, and unrelated to this video, it's a good reason to provide a transcript of videos (advice I myself rarely follow) -- people with bad voices (or good voices that inexplicably annoy some people) can still have interesting things to say.
- devy 15y agoIs Paul Graham going to put money for a start-up pharma to mass produce this if this deems to be silver bullet as it claims to be? I smell a lot of money!
- tomjen3 15y agoHolding the patent on this, once approved by the FDA, will make you able to roll in money for as long as you want. But getting there will cost an insane amount of money. Far more than YC will ever get. It is more money than any of the VCs have, though they may have enough if you combine the three or four biggest. And even then the drug may fail.
- praxeologist 15y agoI'll wait for human trials but I love their ballsy acronym for now: PANACEA (Pharmacological Augmentation of Nonspecific Anti-pathogen Cellular Enzymes and Activities)
- DRACOMALFOA 15y agoWell, sad thing is humans have been creating most of the diseases that have been released into the wild for the past 50 years... Lyme disease, H1N1(now H1N5-X), etc... The reason they do NOT cure diseases is because, overpopulation would explode. Cancer isn't cured for this reason but, they certainly love money for a whole bunch more research. The same can be said with HIV/AIDS. You may think its absurd or wrong in concept but, do the math for yourself... You think 10-billion people by 2020 is a large number... If they cured even a single major disease(like cancer), 10-billion would be 20-billion by 2030... It's an interesting thing to know that humans are responsible for killing ourselves only because, they won't fund technologies for space travel & transforming. Enjoy being slaves on this watery rock. ;-)
- uncoder0 15y agoYour reply is surely in jest.However, if it was not, the Iceman who lived 5,000 years had Lyme disease. "Perhaps most surprising, researchers found the genetic footprint of bacteria known as Borrelia burgdorferi in his DNA—making the Iceman the earliest known human infected by the bug that causes Lyme disease."[1] [1]http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/11/iceman-autopsy/hall-text http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/11/iceman-autopsy/hal...
- DanWaterworth 15y ago> the Iceman who lived 5,000 years had Lyme disease I think you mean the iceman who lived 5,000 years ago, otherwise woah!
- uncoder0 15y agoPre-coffee comment. Thanks for the proof read.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- secoif 15y agoYep, all medical science researchers worldwide are in on a plot to curb population growth for profit. Definitely.
- nohat 15y agoGood rule of thumb: if the title is a question, the answer is no.
- tomkin 15y agoFirst time I've heard that...but I have to say it's basically true.
- sambeau 15y agoSadly, that is mostly due us being over-sensitised to dodgy sales techniques, e.g. "Is this the best car seat cover ever?"
- pigbucket 15y agoAs discussed in Bertrand Russell’s If the Title is a Question, Is the Answer No?
- dacilselig 15y agoI came to say the same thing. The moment I see that question mark, the skeptical side of me comes into play.
- Symmetry 15y agoA good rule of thumb for mainstream media news reporting, but not for blog posts, scientific papers, books, or other such categories.
- Toucan 15y agohttp://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2832 http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2832 A superb example.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sneak 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
- 15y ago
- streptomycin 15y agoI wonder why this got published in PLoS ONE rather than a more traditional and higher impact journal.
- lell 15y agoIn pathology, it is sometimes hard to publish radical ideas in traditional & high impact journals. They prefer breakthroughs in established approaches.
- saulrh 15y agoIt's already been going around the public news circuit for a while, and they undoubtedly got some extra support and funding because it did. PLoS ONE publications are much easier for the public to access.
- streptomycin 15y agoPLoS ONE is far from the most prestigious open access journal, even within the PLoS family. And even non-open access journals typically allow you to pay a couple thousand dollars to make a paper open access.
- carbocation 15y agoPLoS ONE is quite a reputable journal, one which some people prefer for philosophical reasons (open access). Without knowing the submission history of this paper or talking with referees in the big name journals, it's hard to know whether or not they submitted this to one of the other journals and simply didn't get accepted.
- rickyconnolly 15y agoIt seems that DRACO works by binding double-stranded RNA. This will work for many, but not all, viruses. Viruses can also have single stranded RNA genomes, like influenza, as well as single- and double-stranded DNA genomes, like herpes. Optimistically, this is s cure for a subclass of viruses.
- Tossrock 15y agoDid you read the article? It's not related to the virus's genome, it's related to the RNA that genome produces, which the interviewee contends is always doublestranded. In fact they specifically address DNA viruses and herpes.
- secoif 15y agoI wish more science would get behind crowd funding, then we could potentially have this kind of stuff sooner/at all. I wince at all of the amazing science that doesn't kick off, not because of a lack of feasibility or interest but simply because of a lack of funding.
- refurb 15y agoIf you look at the number of ideas that get funded and fail, I would say there is more money out there than good ideas at the moment.
- robomartin 15y agoSounds promising. It'll be interesting to watch and see how this evolves. Here's an off-topic comment issued in the spirit of constructive criticism for the site (please don't downvote based on this): If any HN reader has an account with process.org could you --if you agree, of course-- suggest that a small gray font against a gray background is simply not a good idea? On an iPad without zooming it is really straining to read. On a desktop with a 24 inch 1920 x 1200 monitor it is not comfortable. Bad idea. A larger black font would be best.
- martian 15y agoIf website backgrounds really bother you (and surely process.org isn't the only culprit), try using the Reader button in the top bar of Mobile Safari. Or try using ihackernews.com, there's an "Article Text" link that works very well for just showing you the body of an article on a simple white background.
- mmj48 15y ago> If website backgrounds really bother you While I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, your wording deflects blame from the site's retarded text contrast to the GP (robomartin). (no snark intended)
- cowkingdeluxe 15y agoYeah, I had to take the time to implement a custom stylish style for the website in firefox before I started reading it.
- jrnkntl 15y agoTo prevent having to 'implement custom styling', use Readability (firefox add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readability/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readability/) or as for Safari the Reader functionality: http://shrt.nl/s/shot-UD7ba5RjHg.png http://shrt.nl/s/shot-UD7ba5RjHg.png
- Splines 15y ago
- xanadohnt 15y agoThis is great until the fallout is destroying all the potentially "good" viruses with which humans are infected. Little research has been done to determine the good bugs. You can guarantee lots of beneficial viruses will be identified once the adverse affects of their absence begins wreaking havoc.
- sukuriant 15y agoI came on to inquire precisely that. This would most likely kill the good viruses, too. What are they going to do to counteract those virii death?
- seclorum 15y agoI'm guessing they can target the virus RNA they're attempting to eradicate.
- sukuriant 15y agoWhat I gathered from the article, though, was that this shortens a cell's self-checks before the cell itself self-destructs. There is no virus RNA being evaluated, that's still done by the cell. If I misunderstood the article and people's commons in this thread, please help me understand properly.
- xanadohnt 15y agoNo, you are correct, sukuriant. The mechanism here is working on the host cell. Which is precisely the point of the article. Past attempts at working on the virus directly have all but failed. That's why this method is so effective and promising. However, its effectiveness is also what makes it so scary.
- xanadohnt 15y agoNo, you are correct, sukuriant. The mechanism here is working on the host cell. Which is precisely the point of the article. Past attempts at working on the virus directly have all but failed. That's why this method is so effective and promising. However, its effectiveness is also what makes it so scary.
- sambeau 15y agoI was slightly baffled and then amused to read the phase "And can you take it up to monkey here [at MIT]?". It took me a moment to work out what that meant (even though I could have read the next sentence for a clue).
- dangerboysteve 15y agoCompany start-up name ... maybe ... Umbrella Corporation
- silentscope 15y agoProps to the writer for going out an getting the interview on a great story: possible cure for viruses project diagnosed with lethal lack of funding. But there are some "questions" to not ask in a news interview: "Oh, wow. That’s an amazing idea." "There haved been articles, but I feel this is definitely front-page material." I agree, this is amazing interesting stuff and the interviewer and interviewee made it great. But when you tell me how interesting it is instead of letting the content speak, you set off alarms in my head. Sorry for being a curmudgeon--it's easy to berate things without contributing. Just saying don't let your opinion overshadow the story.
- tokenadult 15y agoMy all-time favorite link to put in an HN comment is the one I will put here, "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html by Peter Norvig, LISP hacker and now director of research at Google. I hope the preliminary research findings discussed in the interview submitted here are replicated and prove to have clinical benefit for human patients. Finding out whether or not they do will still take much work by other researchers.
- seanp2k2 15y agoFor this reason along with many others, I can't be impressed when Bezos spends money raising some rocket motors from the bottom of the ocean while potentially one of the greatest medical accomplishments of humans goes almost unfunded.
- bubfranks 15y agohah, great username. I didn't know HN had a chaperon. btw, thanks for posting that link, and thanks to Peter Norvig!
- jballanc 15y agoThis is a very interesting and novel technique, but it brings to mind a very interesting and (to my knowledge) still very much open question in human biology: just what all does RNA do? Obviously, we know quite a lot about RNAs such as mRNA, tRNA, and rRNA, but until the later part of the 1990s it would have been nearly impossible to predict such things as snRNA, snoRNA, siRNA, miRNA, and RNAi. Then there's the question of retrotransposons. Could they cause a spurious triggering of DRACO? How active are they and how important is that activity over short time scales (the time scale of an infection, say)? What about long time scales (say, a lifetime of treating illnesses with DRACO)? Unfortunately, retrotransposons are thought to behave very differently in mice than in humans, so if this research doesn't translate to humans, my bet would be that it has something to do this difference. All that said, this is very creative work and should rightfully be celebrated.
- minikomi 15y agoNot to mention viroids - tightly balled RNAs of only a few hundred (220!) nucleotides which, due to the shape they form, coerce replication machinery to reproduce them. Definitely on the very edge of what can be considered "alive". Edit: that is to say, they don't encode any proteins - they simply loop back on each other and the shape does all the work.
- irollboozers 15y agoThe shape is more important as a container, transporting other silencing RNA or miRNA. People have developed nano cages that act as slippery shells to deliver a payload, and so far some insanely promising results in mammalian cells. For what it's worth, I think this will be the mechanism for majority of gene based drug delivery in 10 years.
- minikomi 15y agoOh really? cool. It's been a while since I read anything about viroids. They somehow bundle miRNAs?
- minikomi 15y agoVery interesting. I did my honours research in engineering grasses (Medicago) with a complementary RNA to a commonly occurring virus in order to trigger a similar defense. Unfortunately, somehow a few generations later the plants just stopped expressing those genes. Plants don't have an immune system per-say but they do actively defend against double stranded RNA.