8 ms·

One universal antiviral to rule them all?

331 points by breve 1y ago

curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Wont viruses just adapt and now we've got worse viruses as a result? Isn't this kind of why doctors don't like to prescribe antibiotics too often, because they become ineffective in the long run. I'm genuinely asking, I'm a simple software dev not a doctor.
- throw2432234 1y ago
  [flagged]
- throw2432234 1y ago
  [flagged]
- kristjank 1y ago
  Antibiotics are related to bacteria, which have different mutation mechanisms than viruses. I'm also a tech guy, so someone may correct me. Also, this seems to influence the human end to make protective material, not act on the viruses directly.
  - busyant 1y ago
    Viruses can acquire resistance by mutation. This has been well established for decades. FWIW, I was trained as a bacterial geneticist and routinely used bacteriophage (viruses that infect bacteria) with various resistance mutations. Viral mutations are not restricted to viruses that infect bacteria. edit: in fact, fundamental aspects of the genetic code were determined by analyzing and exploiting viral mutations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crick,_Brenner_et_al._experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crick,_Brenner_et_al._experime...
    - busyant 1y ago
      OT: Just replying to myself to ramble a little bit more. The Crick, Brenner et al. paper that I cited above * studied mutations in a viral gene called "rIIB" * the authors used those rIIB mutations to determine that the genetic code was a non-overlapping triplet (now called codons) -- a pretty fundamental discovery. * What's amazing to me is that they still have NO IDEA what the rIIB gene actually _does_, mechanistically. It's like learning a little bit about God using an enigma machine (sorry, shitty simile).
  - throe44ruurtj 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - quotemstr 1y ago
        I'm honestly confused about what the OP could be getting out of a drive by comment so obviously and verifiably wrong. Seems like a poor use for even cheap AI inference tokens. It doesn't even have trolling value. Is it so wrong of me to demand competence of my spammers?
    - 15155 1y ago
      What's the purpose of annual flu vaccination programs if "viruses do not mutate!"?
- thyristan 1y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. Antibiotic resistance develops because antibiotics are only somewhat deadly to bacteria, so natural selection can occur and bacteria develop resistance over time. There are some antibiotic/bacteria combinations where this doesn't happen, because the respective antibiotic is so deadly to that special kind of bacteria, that no survivors can pass on their slightly increased resistance. And bacteria self-replicate, whereas a virus needs to infect a cell and be reproduced by that cell. Some antiviral mechanisms attack the reproduction proteins that the human cells use, which the virus cannot do without. And the human cells don't have reproductive pressure to replicate viruses, quite the contrary.
  - francisofascii 1y ago
    Is a fair analogy, antibiotics kill, whereas antivirals use birth control? So viruses would have to find a way to circumvent the replication inhibitors or potentially find a noval way to replicate.
    - strbean 1y ago
      Some classes of antibiotics use birth control - rather than killing bacteria directly, they inhibit reproduction. I think the biggest difference is that bacteria can react to a treatment, while viruses don't have the capacity to react. If you've stopped a virus from replicating, it's essentially dead. A bacterium may have defensive measures it can take. It could form an endospore and try to wait things out. If you've stopped it from reproducing, as it ages it might start accumulating free radicals that increase DNA damage, leading to a higher chance of it mutating to resist the antibiotic. Etc.
      - Terr_ 1y ago
        > I think the biggest difference is that bacteria can react to a treatment, while viruses don't have the capacity to react. Bacteria also swap genes between themselves [0], whereas two viral particles sitting on the same Petri dish are too inert/simple for that. That represents an additional way for adaptive tricks to spread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
- aredox 1y ago
  1) Viruses don't adapt instantly nor perfectly - that's why viruses can be animal-specific. Influenza (or recently SARS-CoV) are famous because they are malleable enough to adapt to new hosts, human or animal, within a few months or years, but not all viruses have this ability. 2) To further illustrate, some viruses have been nearly eliminated with a single vaccine. Polio didn't manage to adapt before going almost extinct. And a good reason why is: 3) Viruses can only evolve inside contaminated hosts. If you find a cure that stops quickly the virus from multiplying and contaminating, you are also curtailing its ability to adapt. A contaminated host is a giant casino machine, allowing the virus to mutate until it hits a new evolutionary step. A strong enough vaccine or treatment is like throwing out the virus before it has time to play much.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    Two viruses have been entirely eliminated in the wild, one (Smallpox) still exists in government research facilities the other (Rinderpest) I believe is just gone because it wasn't useful as a direct weapon (humans aren't affected) and nobody actually wants Rinderpest, it was just killing cattle and while poor farmers need their cattle or they'll starve the rich want to drink milk and eat steak so they weren't keen on this virus either and helped fund its eradication.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > A contaminated host is a giant casino machine, allowing the virus to mutate until it hits a new evolutionary step. And even worse, some viruses can swap genes if a host has multiple infections at a given time. Bats in particular are known as "hot pots".
- grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
  Is it really true that we have “worse” viruses, or that they are adapting to our modern antibiotic regime & reverting to the status quo?
  - XorNot 1y ago
    Antibiotics have never killed any viruses ever. They are exclusively for treating bacterial infections (which are generally worse by a lot).
    - tiahura 1y ago
      Azithromycin (rhinovirus, influenza A, Zika), clarithromycin (influenza A, rhinovirus), doxycycline (dengue, Zika), minocycline (West Nile), teicoplanin/dalbavancin (Ebola, MERS/SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2), rifampin/rifamycins (orthopoxviruses), aminoglycosides (HSV-2, influenza A, Zika), salinomycin/monensin (influenza A/B, coronaviruses incl. SARS-CoV-2), nanchangmycin (Zika, West Nile, dengue, chikungunya), nitroxoline (mpox), and some fluoroquinolones have all shown antiviral properties. And no, strep throat is not worse than ebola.
      - bee_rider 1y ago
        I think they used “generally” on purpose, to make a general observation. Of course, there exist viral infections that are worse than the most common bacterial ones. There’s some ambiguity in their comment because it isn’t obvious what we’re sort of… averaging over, but I think they clearly don’t mean that there no serious viral infections exist.
      - ted_dunning 1y ago
        Citations? The examples that you gave that I checked were not supportive of your assertions.
    - grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
      Agh. That’s what I meant. What I was trying to ask is if you took pre-antibiotic staph and resistant staph, rolled back in time and infected two people, would one be worse than the other? ie - are they harder for the immune system to fight, or just resistant to antibiotics.
- quotemstr 1y ago
  Of course. Given unlimited time, viruses will develop resistance. Resistance = evolution = descent + modification + selection. You can quibble about whether viruses are alive, but they definitely evolve. But so what? Anti-pathogen drugs are useful in the period during which resistance hasn't become universal, and if and when it comes a problem, we'll have other drugs. Besides: sometimes you get lucky and the virus goes extinct before it can develop resistance (e.g. smallpox)
  - MengerSponge 1y ago
    That's not really true. Evolution is constrained by physics, so while bacteria can evolve to live in 100C water, they can't evolve to live in molten magma, or the surface of the sun. Similarly, they can evolve to live off of isopropyl alcohol, but they can't evolve resistance to sufficiently concentrated bleach (sodium hypochlorite).
    - capitainenemo 1y ago
      I'm not sure what you consider "sufficiently concentrated" but some existing viruses (which form spores) can already survive a 1% sodium hypochlorite solution cleaning, which is pretty crazy-high. At that point you're risking damage to surfaces/skin. Doesn't seem impossible it could go higher if bleach exposure was consistently selected for.
      - glenstein 1y ago
        Surviving in 1% bleach doesn't demonstrate the supremacy of evolution over physical constraints, and it's important to keep the eye on the ball of what this whole point was about. There are circumstances such as the temperature of the Sun, where DNA, or any molecular structure, or even atoms, can't hold together, and so there's no evolutionary pathways that can iterate toward survival. You can't have molecular biology without molecules. It's an extreme example, but it demonstrates a fundamental constraint that can't be evolved around. Ideally vaccines can find an equivalent in the space of mechanistic interactions that cut off any evolutionary pathway a virus could reach, either exterminating the virus before it has enough time to complete the search, or by genuinely leaving no pathway even with infinite searching. Contrary to what you may have heard from Jeff Goldblum life does not always find a way.
- etiam 1y ago
  Correct. And the really, really bad part about abusing natural parts if the immune system to provoke pathogen resistance against them is that the resistance will target part of natural immunity. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35700881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35700881
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
    Don't viruses evolve to evade the immune system anyways though?
    - etiam 1y ago
      Normally they don't get to try that with a strong selection pressure for a handling a particular monoculture. Admittedly the method in the present article is probably better than the idiocy of extracting antibacterial peptides from context for use as drug products, since at least this will always be used in the context of a full immune system and they trigger a number of genes which probably regulate a whole subcomponent of measures rather than just one or two mechanisms. Even so, it lifts up a particular part from the diffuse field of defenses as salient and particularly worthwhile to defeat. Also, keep in mind that many species of virus have so small genomes they have to overload the readings of parts of the nucleic acid sequences to get a full set of proteins. Evolve to evade the immune system, certainly. But if you're implying that it will happen in the same ways, at anything like the same rate and to the same extent regardless of what we do, no that's not right.
      - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
        Interesting. Not sure I buy it though. By your logic, we'd be better off if we gave patients a cocktail containing small amounts of many different antibiotics. By giving a single antibiotic in a large dose, we are "lifting up a particular part of our field of defenses as salient and particularly worthwhile to defeat". Sounds bad. Willing to bite the bullet and sign on to this kitchen-sink approach, of offering patients a cocktail containing small amounts of many antibiotics? The problem I see with the cocktail approach is that a pathogen can gradually evolve defenses against everything simultaneously, in parallel. With a cocktail, every element of the cocktail provides a distinct glide path for a virus to increase its contextual fitness. That also sounds bad! The main way I see this situation improving is if two elements of the cocktail happen to act as a sort of clamp, where any virus which begins to defeat one ends up increasing the effectiveness of the other.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  My understanding is that there's often at tradeoff between fitness and antiviral resistance. The virus starts on a fitness local maximum, and it has to pay a fitness cost as it evolves resistance to the antiviral (due to stepping off the local maximum). If the antiviral is ineffective, and the virus continues reproducing, over time it will evolve "compensatory mutations" which allow it to regain some or all of the lost fitness. Based on my recollections of this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5499642/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5499642/ So yeah, I wouldn't be super worried about the virus evolving to become worse in absolute terms as a result of antiviral exposure. Virii are evolving all the time anyways. Antivirals can also reduce evolution speed by fighting an infection: A more severe infection means more virions means greater evolution speed. I believe some new COVID variants were thought to have evolved in the body of someone who was severely infected. (However: Note that it's not necessarily beneficial for fitness for the virus to evolve greater infection severity, especially if that interferes with transmission.)
  - tempestn 1y ago
    Same deal with vaccination, right? We saw this with covid; as new variants evolved to evade the vaccines, they tended to result in less severe infections (even to the unvaccinated) than the original.
    - ted_dunning 1y ago
      Citation? I think (also without a citation) that this was never properly demonstrated. And there is nearly nobody left who has no immunity from either infection or injection. We are definitely still seeing quite a few deaths from COVID.
      - tempestn 1y ago
        After some reading, it appears it's more of a mixed bag. Evolutionary pressure from vaccines can have that effect, as appears to have been the case with Omicron, but it's not guaranteed, and some variants appear to have been more virulent than the original virus. See the "Relative Severity of Variants" section of this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00841-7?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00841-7?utm_sourc...
- cwmma 1y ago
  Probably, currently it's just 15 people that have it, but if you started giving it to more people there would be incredible advantages to any virus that could adapt and viruses mutate fast.
yablak 1y ago
Sounds like the first few scenes of every Zombie movie and TV show ever...
- oaiey 1y ago
  Indeed. Or an Utopia. But sentencing on that is still open
  - jihadjihad 1y ago
    I like the turn of phrase "sentencing" here. The jury gave its verdict, guilty as all hell, and now we're ready for the sentencing hearing, Your Honor.
    - IIAOPSW 1y ago
      There are things that are wrong and there are things that are crimes and it is up to those on the bench to appreciate the difference.
tovej 1y ago
Interesting, and potentially very good. But I can't help but wonder, like at least one other commenter, that this might have unexpected effects if applied at a larger scale. I know some viruses kill bacteria for instance. I don't know, something about universal applicability makes me a little uneasy.
- XorNot 1y ago
  Bacteriophages don't infect things which aren't bacteria. In fact they're so absurdly specific that while you could bathe in a solution of them and not get sick, they also frequently fail to infect slightly different members of the same species, which is why ultimately they never become antibiotic alternatives: having the right one on hand ranges from difficult to impossible.
  - tovej 1y ago
    Are you saying that this antiviral would not kill bacteriophages? Or are you saying you think the effect would be small because the population in our bodies is small?
    - XorNot 1y ago
      There are not bacteriophages in your body, except where bacteria are. And since they don't infect human cells, they're being constantly destroyed already by the primary immune system even if they get there. Viral infections only successfully persist by replicating faster then the human body destroys them, and by hiding in human cells. This isn't a system which is some sort of toxic to viruses, it's an immune booster.
      - tovej 1y ago
        Got it, thank you for explaining. That was unclear to me from the article.
  - unddoch 1y ago
    Yes, some phages are very specific - but not all of them! And we're slowly getting better at this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01832-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01832-5
vprcic 1y ago
The prospect of being able to use this against viruses like the one causing rabies is pretty exciting!
- account42 1y ago
  Don't we already have treatments for the rabies virus but the problem is that it's too late once the virus gets to the central nervous system which is when symptoms show? How would this new antiviral be different?
  - lotharcable 1y ago
    Rabies anti-virus require very carefully handling and refrigeration and thus can be extremely expensive for hospitals to keep in stock. And, yes, it needs to be applied before symptoms start to appear. Otherwise death is almost for certain. I doubt this research will lead directly to a better vaccine, but having a better vaccine could save a lot of lives.
    - Fomite 1y ago
      There's a lot of work right now in figuring out ways to reduce the cold chain requirements and make it easier to stock.
  - throw73738484 1y ago
    Problem are antivaxerz who refuse to treat and test dogs! They prefer random street dogs over children !
abeppu 1y ago
> When he and his colleagues looked at the individuals’ immune cells, they could see encounters with all sorts of viruses—flu, measles, mumps, chickenpox. But the patients had never reported any overt signs of infection or illness. Given that the article goes on to talk about mild persistent inflammation, is it possible that these individuals are sometimes asymptomatic but still capable of carrying/transmitting viruses at least temporarily? The article talks about potentially immunizing healthcare workers during a future pandemic, but if this was just allowing people to never develop symptoms (and not have to leave work) while having low-grade infections, would we accidentally create a work-force of Typhoid Marys?
- devmor 1y ago
  I am not a medical expert, but from what I read the last time I saw this being discussed, ISG15 deficiency also causes something called "infernopathy" that leads to inflammation across the entire body. I don't believe it's related to viral activity at all.
  - mapontosevenths 1y ago
    From TFA: "We only generate a small amount of these ten proteins, for a very short time, and that leads to much less inflammation than what we see in ISG15-deficient individuals,” Bogunovic says. “But that inflammation is enough to prevent antiviral diseases." It seems that the goal is to learn to trigger the benefits, without triggering the bad parts. Which, should probably have been obvious to you without even bothering to read the article.
    - Windchaser 1y ago
      The weird thing about this quote: is the inflammation enough to prevent viral diseases, or antiviral diseases?
      - etiam 1y ago
        To the extent the disease is due to factors hurting the virus, I guess it's viable as a perspective, but I'd be surprised if it's deliberate in this case.
quotemstr 1y ago
Broad-based inflammation delivered by lipid nanoparticle chock full of mRNA: what could possibly go wrong? I'll stick with monoclonal antibodies, thanks. Oh, and here's what the ISG15 deficiency (the condition these mRNAs are there to simulate) does: > Patients present...with infectious, neurologic or dermatologic features. Basal ganglia calcification is observed in all patients... The basal ganglia calcifications may cause epileptic seizures... The IFN-I inflammation may also manifest early in life as ulcerative skin lesions in the armpit, groin and neck regions. Finally, ISG15-deficiency leads to mendelian susceptibility to mycobacterial disease... [t]hese infections present as fistulizing lymphadenopathies and respiratory symptoms following BCG vaccination. Yeah, about those antiviral superpowers...
- mapontosevenths 1y ago
  What's wrong with mRNA, or lipid nanoparticles?
  - mapontosevenths 1y ago
    For the record, here are the primary researchers qualifications: https://www.pediatrics.columbia.edu/profile/dusan-bogunovic-phd https://www.pediatrics.columbia.edu/profile/dusan-bogunovic-... His reputably published, peer reviewed, work can be found here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.adx5758 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.adx5758
- ChrisClark 1y ago
  [flagged]
inka 1y ago
And the part where he says people with this mutation are more prone to bacterial infections is not worrying, because…? In a world of more and more antibiotic resistant bacteria, that does not seem like a good trade-off…
- empath75 1y ago
  Probably the issue is microphages being wiped out which allows bacteria to thrive. But you wouldn't take this _all the time_, only when you had a specific viral infection to get rid of.
- lotharcable 1y ago
  One of the effects of ISG15 deficiency is a disease called "Type I interferonopathy". Among the symptoms of this disease includes things like necrotic lesions and severe multi-systemic damages. From what I gather the fact that these people are not more susceptible to viral infections was a surprise. Which probably relates to why the doctors in the parent article were investigating its possible anti-viral properties.
- perlgeek 1y ago
  This is researched as a potential treatment to an acute viral infection. For the duration of the treatment, you can accept the increased risk of bacterial infections. Just like you accept the risk of increased yeast infections while treating bacterial infections with antibiotics, or the risk of any infection while treating a cancer with chemotherapy.
hyperliner 1y ago
What is the “current” scientifically approved and unbiased understanding about the negative effects of the COVID vaccines? There seems to be a lot of information, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and information hiding at least in the perception, if not in reality. I cannot imagine what society at large will have to deal with or what the reaction will be for or against an “everything” therapy, given what happened with Covid.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  >about the negative effects of the COVID vaccines? The biggest negative effect is i've been hearing "you'll be dead in six months from this vaccine" for about 5 years now. It's been 5 years. have you nothing else going on in your life?
  - hyperliner 1y ago
    [dead]
- estearum 1y ago
  The current understanding is that you're 15 to 20 times more likely to suffer severe eye damage from taking Viagra than even the highest risk group (young men) is to encounter a serious adverse effect from the COVID vaccine. The information has not changed dramatically since a few months after its release, and the myocarditis risk was not detected in clinical trials because it is an unbelievably rare event. Detecting it would've required trials orders of magnitude larger than any clinical trial ever.
carlsborg 1y ago
Paper appears to be paywalled. It is however an update to this preprint which is available on Biorxiv: "Broad-spectrum RNA antiviral inspired by ISG15-/- deficiency" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.24.600468v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.24.600468v1 My summary for programmers: When you get a viral infection, immune cells make a signalling protein called a IFN-1 (Type I Interferon) cytokine, and this flips a boolean flag to True on a bunch of genes (interferon-stimulated genes or ISGs) that produce a bunch of proteins (hundreds) that control the infection. ISG15 is one of them and its role appears to be to downregulate and to limit the inflammation. The paper title refers to a ISG15 deficiency, meaning if you are dificient in ISG15 that inflamation limitation goes away. But the paper is actually about how in people that naturally have a ISG15 deficiency, there is an always-on low level expression of some of these pro-inflamation genes. So they take that as a safe level. The did RNA sequencing on experimental ISG15 deficient cells and from heatlhy individuals, identified the mutations, narrowed down to 10 genes (antiviral ones not inhibitors) that in combination significantly inhibited viral replication. They stuck the RNA for such genes in lipid nanoparticles such that they enter host cells, whose ribosomes happily read the RNA like a turing head reads a tape in base 20 and produce proteins encoded by these genes, similar to how the mRNA vaccine works. So why not dose with the IFN-I directly? Three referenced papers show its "poorly tolerated with significant side effects" and all those downregulators that get expressed limit the inflammation response. Disclaimer: IANAB (not a biologist) corrections might be due..
- zoeysmithe 1y ago
  This is typical of "why not just one drug/treatment" for something big like viruses, cancer, etc. I think we'll never have this "one shot," but continue to find tailored treatments for individual conditions. There's no way out of this complexity with "one simple trick," which seems really appealing to the people who determine what gets popular in social media and seemingly politics now. Its just going to be boring and grueling academia and medical trials that are hard for the layperson to understand, hence the important of funding these programs. The recent right-wing election wins and thus a right-wing government cutting all manner of medical grants is supported by the "one weird trick" crowd. Hopefully, the USA will have better leadership in the future to get us back to actual science and to find actual new treatments. Already, even on HN, the top comments are conspiracy-culture coded, "but, but this one company bought the patent and disappeared with it!" Sigh.
Geee 1y ago
It was already invented [0], but the patents were bought by a small company in New Zealand (some kind of big pharma shell company?) who isn't seriously developing it and now appears to be defunct. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO
- ajmurmann 1y ago
  Doesn't sound all the bad from the linked wiki: """ In March 2024 Kimer Med announced it has signed a contract valued at up to USD$750,000 (NZD$1.3 million) with Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the world’s largest independent, nonprofit research and development organization. The contract is focused on the discovery and development of new antiviral drug candidates for the treatment of alphaviruses. """
  - forgotpwagain 1y ago
    The cynical part of me wonders: if this has been a promising approach for 10+ years, why weren't they able to secure VC funding years ago (or nonprofit biomedical research funding from places like the Gates Foundation that care a lot about infectious disease)?
    - Alex3917 1y ago
      This. Claims of a universal antiviral are as old as western medicine itself. Literally the only reason anyone knows what the Hippocratic oath is is because Hippocrates was already famous at the time for promoting elderberry as the universal antiviral.
      - abeppu 1y ago
        My understanding is that the _concept_ of a virus wasn't even established until the late 19th century, because we first needed the germ theory, and then we needed to understand bacteria well enough to have a filter whose pores were known to be smaller than bacteria could pass through, but which some _other_ infection agent could still pass through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virology#Discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virology#Discovery Hippocrates could recommend elderberry for a bunch of ailments, but he didn't have the concept of a "universal antiviral".
mcculley 1y ago
I always wonder this and maybe people in the comments here know the answer: If humans had the technology to eliminate all viruses on Earth, what would be the outcome? Do viruses keep other bad things in check? Would there be bad consequences if we eliminated all viruses?
- ocfnash 1y ago
  Most viruses are bacteriophages, so I imagine bacteria would run wild!
  - zahlman 1y ago
    Aren't bacteria generally much larger than viruses?
    - karolinepauls 1y ago
      Phages don't devour bacteria, they get inside and hijack them, like viruses tend to do with cells.
      - zahlman 1y ago
        Seems strange to call them that, then; but such is English I suppose.
      - melagonster 1y ago
        Sometimes when phages get enough copies inside bacteria. The host will explode and release all phages inside it.
- lotsoweiners 1y ago
  Population control.
  - aurizon 1y ago
    [flagged]
pelorat 1y ago
I don't think this is a good idea.
ggm 1y ago
Persisting inflammation is not kind to bodies. All kinds of things could go wrong, and longterm consequences are easy to hypothesise. Not saying this isn't worth researching but I'd expect big question marks around risk/reward.
- jonny_eh 1y ago
  Exactly my thought. There must be a reason that evolution didn't auto-optin us to these proteins. Everything is a trade-off. It's possible with the prevalancy of viruses in the modern world that we would, on balance, benefit from a more vigilant immune system.
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  I'm guessing the deployment ends up being less mass-population and more "oops, this guy with a viral disease just coughed on me." Though I can easily see long-term, preemptive use being worth the risk for people dealing with, say, ebola patients.
- GTP 1y ago
  It seems to me that the point is to induce the inflammation only when someone is exposed to a virus or developed a viral infection, not to have a persisting one. Just like you take antibiotics if you get a bacterial infection, but only for the time needed to treat the infection. You don't take antibiotics every day "just in case".
user214412412 1y ago
rfk gonna ban hammer this so fast
cmoski 1y ago
Isn't everyone just drinking bleach these days anyway?
killerstorm 1y ago
Sounds like they are boosting what body already does in case of a viral infection. I wonder how different it is from interferon therapy - interferons are used to signal viral infection, so they also activate immunity.

331 points by breve 1y ago

[dead]

Wont viruses just adapt and now we've got worse viruses as a result? Isn't this kind of why doctors don't like to prescribe antibiotics too often, because they become ineffective in the long run. I'm genuinely asking, I'm a simple software dev not a doctor.

throw2432234 1y ago
[flagged]
throw2432234 1y ago
[flagged]
kristjank 1y ago
Antibiotics are related to bacteria, which have different mutation mechanisms than viruses. I'm also a tech guy, so someone may correct me. Also, this seems to influence the human end to make protective material, not act on the viruses directly.
- busyant 1y ago
  Viruses can acquire resistance by mutation. This has been well established for decades. FWIW, I was trained as a bacterial geneticist and routinely used bacteriophage (viruses that infect bacteria) with various resistance mutations. Viral mutations are not restricted to viruses that infect bacteria. edit: in fact, fundamental aspects of the genetic code were determined by analyzing and exploiting viral mutations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crick,_Brenner_et_al._experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crick,_Brenner_et_al._experime...
  - busyant 1y ago
    OT: Just replying to myself to ramble a little bit more. The Crick, Brenner et al. paper that I cited above * studied mutations in a viral gene called "rIIB" * the authors used those rIIB mutations to determine that the genetic code was a non-overlapping triplet (now called codons) -- a pretty fundamental discovery. * What's amazing to me is that they still have NO IDEA what the rIIB gene actually _does_, mechanistically. It's like learning a little bit about God using an enigma machine (sorry, shitty simile).
- throe44ruurtj 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - quotemstr 1y ago
      I'm honestly confused about what the OP could be getting out of a drive by comment so obviously and verifiably wrong. Seems like a poor use for even cheap AI inference tokens. It doesn't even have trolling value. Is it so wrong of me to demand competence of my spammers?
  - 15155 1y ago
    What's the purpose of annual flu vaccination programs if "viruses do not mutate!"?
thyristan 1y ago
Maybe, maybe not. Antibiotic resistance develops because antibiotics are only somewhat deadly to bacteria, so natural selection can occur and bacteria develop resistance over time. There are some antibiotic/bacteria combinations where this doesn't happen, because the respective antibiotic is so deadly to that special kind of bacteria, that no survivors can pass on their slightly increased resistance. And bacteria self-replicate, whereas a virus needs to infect a cell and be reproduced by that cell. Some antiviral mechanisms attack the reproduction proteins that the human cells use, which the virus cannot do without. And the human cells don't have reproductive pressure to replicate viruses, quite the contrary.
- francisofascii 1y ago
  Is a fair analogy, antibiotics kill, whereas antivirals use birth control? So viruses would have to find a way to circumvent the replication inhibitors or potentially find a noval way to replicate.
  - strbean 1y ago
    Some classes of antibiotics use birth control - rather than killing bacteria directly, they inhibit reproduction. I think the biggest difference is that bacteria can react to a treatment, while viruses don't have the capacity to react. If you've stopped a virus from replicating, it's essentially dead. A bacterium may have defensive measures it can take. It could form an endospore and try to wait things out. If you've stopped it from reproducing, as it ages it might start accumulating free radicals that increase DNA damage, leading to a higher chance of it mutating to resist the antibiotic. Etc.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      > I think the biggest difference is that bacteria can react to a treatment, while viruses don't have the capacity to react. Bacteria also swap genes between themselves [0], whereas two viral particles sitting on the same Petri dish are too inert/simple for that. That represents an additional way for adaptive tricks to spread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
aredox 1y ago
1) Viruses don't adapt instantly nor perfectly - that's why viruses can be animal-specific. Influenza (or recently SARS-CoV) are famous because they are malleable enough to adapt to new hosts, human or animal, within a few months or years, but not all viruses have this ability. 2) To further illustrate, some viruses have been nearly eliminated with a single vaccine. Polio didn't manage to adapt before going almost extinct. And a good reason why is: 3) Viruses can only evolve inside contaminated hosts. If you find a cure that stops quickly the virus from multiplying and contaminating, you are also curtailing its ability to adapt. A contaminated host is a giant casino machine, allowing the virus to mutate until it hits a new evolutionary step. A strong enough vaccine or treatment is like throwing out the virus before it has time to play much.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  Two viruses have been entirely eliminated in the wild, one (Smallpox) still exists in government research facilities the other (Rinderpest) I believe is just gone because it wasn't useful as a direct weapon (humans aren't affected) and nobody actually wants Rinderpest, it was just killing cattle and while poor farmers need their cattle or they'll starve the rich want to drink milk and eat steak so they weren't keen on this virus either and helped fund its eradication.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > A contaminated host is a giant casino machine, allowing the virus to mutate until it hits a new evolutionary step. And even worse, some viruses can swap genes if a host has multiple infections at a given time. Bats in particular are known as "hot pots".
grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
Is it really true that we have “worse” viruses, or that they are adapting to our modern antibiotic regime & reverting to the status quo?
- XorNot 1y ago
  Antibiotics have never killed any viruses ever. They are exclusively for treating bacterial infections (which are generally worse by a lot).
  - tiahura 1y ago
    Azithromycin (rhinovirus, influenza A, Zika), clarithromycin (influenza A, rhinovirus), doxycycline (dengue, Zika), minocycline (West Nile), teicoplanin/dalbavancin (Ebola, MERS/SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2), rifampin/rifamycins (orthopoxviruses), aminoglycosides (HSV-2, influenza A, Zika), salinomycin/monensin (influenza A/B, coronaviruses incl. SARS-CoV-2), nanchangmycin (Zika, West Nile, dengue, chikungunya), nitroxoline (mpox), and some fluoroquinolones have all shown antiviral properties. And no, strep throat is not worse than ebola.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      I think they used “generally” on purpose, to make a general observation. Of course, there exist viral infections that are worse than the most common bacterial ones. There’s some ambiguity in their comment because it isn’t obvious what we’re sort of… averaging over, but I think they clearly don’t mean that there no serious viral infections exist.
    - ted_dunning 1y ago
      Citations? The examples that you gave that I checked were not supportive of your assertions.
  - grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
    Agh. That’s what I meant. What I was trying to ask is if you took pre-antibiotic staph and resistant staph, rolled back in time and infected two people, would one be worse than the other? ie - are they harder for the immune system to fight, or just resistant to antibiotics.
quotemstr 1y ago
Of course. Given unlimited time, viruses will develop resistance. Resistance = evolution = descent + modification + selection. You can quibble about whether viruses are alive, but they definitely evolve. But so what? Anti-pathogen drugs are useful in the period during which resistance hasn't become universal, and if and when it comes a problem, we'll have other drugs. Besides: sometimes you get lucky and the virus goes extinct before it can develop resistance (e.g. smallpox)
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  That's not really true. Evolution is constrained by physics, so while bacteria can evolve to live in 100C water, they can't evolve to live in molten magma, or the surface of the sun. Similarly, they can evolve to live off of isopropyl alcohol, but they can't evolve resistance to sufficiently concentrated bleach (sodium hypochlorite).
  - capitainenemo 1y ago
    I'm not sure what you consider "sufficiently concentrated" but some existing viruses (which form spores) can already survive a 1% sodium hypochlorite solution cleaning, which is pretty crazy-high. At that point you're risking damage to surfaces/skin. Doesn't seem impossible it could go higher if bleach exposure was consistently selected for.
    - glenstein 1y ago
      Surviving in 1% bleach doesn't demonstrate the supremacy of evolution over physical constraints, and it's important to keep the eye on the ball of what this whole point was about. There are circumstances such as the temperature of the Sun, where DNA, or any molecular structure, or even atoms, can't hold together, and so there's no evolutionary pathways that can iterate toward survival. You can't have molecular biology without molecules. It's an extreme example, but it demonstrates a fundamental constraint that can't be evolved around. Ideally vaccines can find an equivalent in the space of mechanistic interactions that cut off any evolutionary pathway a virus could reach, either exterminating the virus before it has enough time to complete the search, or by genuinely leaving no pathway even with infinite searching. Contrary to what you may have heard from Jeff Goldblum life does not always find a way.
etiam 1y ago
Correct. And the really, really bad part about abusing natural parts if the immune system to provoke pathogen resistance against them is that the resistance will target part of natural immunity. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35700881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35700881
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  Don't viruses evolve to evade the immune system anyways though?
  - etiam 1y ago
    Normally they don't get to try that with a strong selection pressure for a handling a particular monoculture. Admittedly the method in the present article is probably better than the idiocy of extracting antibacterial peptides from context for use as drug products, since at least this will always be used in the context of a full immune system and they trigger a number of genes which probably regulate a whole subcomponent of measures rather than just one or two mechanisms. Even so, it lifts up a particular part from the diffuse field of defenses as salient and particularly worthwhile to defeat. Also, keep in mind that many species of virus have so small genomes they have to overload the readings of parts of the nucleic acid sequences to get a full set of proteins. Evolve to evade the immune system, certainly. But if you're implying that it will happen in the same ways, at anything like the same rate and to the same extent regardless of what we do, no that's not right.
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
      Interesting. Not sure I buy it though. By your logic, we'd be better off if we gave patients a cocktail containing small amounts of many different antibiotics. By giving a single antibiotic in a large dose, we are "lifting up a particular part of our field of defenses as salient and particularly worthwhile to defeat". Sounds bad. Willing to bite the bullet and sign on to this kitchen-sink approach, of offering patients a cocktail containing small amounts of many antibiotics? The problem I see with the cocktail approach is that a pathogen can gradually evolve defenses against everything simultaneously, in parallel. With a cocktail, every element of the cocktail provides a distinct glide path for a virus to increase its contextual fitness. That also sounds bad! The main way I see this situation improving is if two elements of the cocktail happen to act as a sort of clamp, where any virus which begins to defeat one ends up increasing the effectiveness of the other.
0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
My understanding is that there's often at tradeoff between fitness and antiviral resistance. The virus starts on a fitness local maximum, and it has to pay a fitness cost as it evolves resistance to the antiviral (due to stepping off the local maximum). If the antiviral is ineffective, and the virus continues reproducing, over time it will evolve "compensatory mutations" which allow it to regain some or all of the lost fitness. Based on my recollections of this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5499642/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5499642/ So yeah, I wouldn't be super worried about the virus evolving to become worse in absolute terms as a result of antiviral exposure. Virii are evolving all the time anyways. Antivirals can also reduce evolution speed by fighting an infection: A more severe infection means more virions means greater evolution speed. I believe some new COVID variants were thought to have evolved in the body of someone who was severely infected. (However: Note that it's not necessarily beneficial for fitness for the virus to evolve greater infection severity, especially if that interferes with transmission.)
- tempestn 1y ago
  Same deal with vaccination, right? We saw this with covid; as new variants evolved to evade the vaccines, they tended to result in less severe infections (even to the unvaccinated) than the original.
  - ted_dunning 1y ago
    Citation? I think (also without a citation) that this was never properly demonstrated. And there is nearly nobody left who has no immunity from either infection or injection. We are definitely still seeing quite a few deaths from COVID.
    - tempestn 1y ago
      After some reading, it appears it's more of a mixed bag. Evolutionary pressure from vaccines can have that effect, as appears to have been the case with Omicron, but it's not guaranteed, and some variants appear to have been more virulent than the original virus. See the "Relative Severity of Variants" section of this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00841-7?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00841-7?utm_sourc...
cwmma 1y ago
Probably, currently it's just 15 people that have it, but if you started giving it to more people there would be incredible advantages to any virus that could adapt and viruses mutate fast.

yablak 1y ago

Sounds like the first few scenes of every Zombie movie and TV show ever...

oaiey 1y ago
Indeed. Or an Utopia. But sentencing on that is still open
- jihadjihad 1y ago
  I like the turn of phrase "sentencing" here. The jury gave its verdict, guilty as all hell, and now we're ready for the sentencing hearing, Your Honor.
  - IIAOPSW 1y ago
    There are things that are wrong and there are things that are crimes and it is up to those on the bench to appreciate the difference.

tovej 1y ago

Interesting, and potentially very good. But I can't help but wonder, like at least one other commenter, that this might have unexpected effects if applied at a larger scale. I know some viruses kill bacteria for instance. I don't know, something about universal applicability makes me a little uneasy.

XorNot 1y ago
Bacteriophages don't infect things which aren't bacteria. In fact they're so absurdly specific that while you could bathe in a solution of them and not get sick, they also frequently fail to infect slightly different members of the same species, which is why ultimately they never become antibiotic alternatives: having the right one on hand ranges from difficult to impossible.
- tovej 1y ago
  Are you saying that this antiviral would not kill bacteriophages? Or are you saying you think the effect would be small because the population in our bodies is small?
  - XorNot 1y ago
    There are not bacteriophages in your body, except where bacteria are. And since they don't infect human cells, they're being constantly destroyed already by the primary immune system even if they get there. Viral infections only successfully persist by replicating faster then the human body destroys them, and by hiding in human cells. This isn't a system which is some sort of toxic to viruses, it's an immune booster.
    - tovej 1y ago
      Got it, thank you for explaining. That was unclear to me from the article.
- unddoch 1y ago
  Yes, some phages are very specific - but not all of them! And we're slowly getting better at this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01832-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01832-5

vprcic 1y ago

The prospect of being able to use this against viruses like the one causing rabies is pretty exciting!

account42 1y ago
Don't we already have treatments for the rabies virus but the problem is that it's too late once the virus gets to the central nervous system which is when symptoms show? How would this new antiviral be different?
- lotharcable 1y ago
  Rabies anti-virus require very carefully handling and refrigeration and thus can be extremely expensive for hospitals to keep in stock. And, yes, it needs to be applied before symptoms start to appear. Otherwise death is almost for certain. I doubt this research will lead directly to a better vaccine, but having a better vaccine could save a lot of lives.
  - Fomite 1y ago
    There's a lot of work right now in figuring out ways to reduce the cold chain requirements and make it easier to stock.
- throw73738484 1y ago
  Problem are antivaxerz who refuse to treat and test dogs! They prefer random street dogs over children !

abeppu 1y ago

> When he and his colleagues looked at the individuals’ immune cells, they could see encounters with all sorts of viruses—flu, measles, mumps, chickenpox. But the patients had never reported any overt signs of infection or illness. Given that the article goes on to talk about mild persistent inflammation, is it possible that these individuals are sometimes asymptomatic but still capable of carrying/transmitting viruses at least temporarily? The article talks about potentially immunizing healthcare workers during a future pandemic, but if this was just allowing people to never develop symptoms (and not have to leave work) while having low-grade infections, would we accidentally create a work-force of Typhoid Marys?

devmor 1y ago
I am not a medical expert, but from what I read the last time I saw this being discussed, ISG15 deficiency also causes something called "infernopathy" that leads to inflammation across the entire body. I don't believe it's related to viral activity at all.
- mapontosevenths 1y ago
  From TFA: "We only generate a small amount of these ten proteins, for a very short time, and that leads to much less inflammation than what we see in ISG15-deficient individuals,” Bogunovic says. “But that inflammation is enough to prevent antiviral diseases." It seems that the goal is to learn to trigger the benefits, without triggering the bad parts. Which, should probably have been obvious to you without even bothering to read the article.
  - Windchaser 1y ago
    The weird thing about this quote: is the inflammation enough to prevent viral diseases, or antiviral diseases?
    - etiam 1y ago
      To the extent the disease is due to factors hurting the virus, I guess it's viable as a perspective, but I'd be surprised if it's deliberate in this case.

quotemstr 1y ago

Broad-based inflammation delivered by lipid nanoparticle chock full of mRNA: what could possibly go wrong? I'll stick with monoclonal antibodies, thanks. Oh, and here's what the ISG15 deficiency (the condition these mRNAs are there to simulate) does: > Patients present...with infectious, neurologic or dermatologic features. Basal ganglia calcification is observed in all patients... The basal ganglia calcifications may cause epileptic seizures... The IFN-I inflammation may also manifest early in life as ulcerative skin lesions in the armpit, groin and neck regions. Finally, ISG15-deficiency leads to mendelian susceptibility to mycobacterial disease... [t]hese infections present as fistulizing lymphadenopathies and respiratory symptoms following BCG vaccination. Yeah, about those antiviral superpowers...

mapontosevenths 1y ago
What's wrong with mRNA, or lipid nanoparticles?
- mapontosevenths 1y ago
  For the record, here are the primary researchers qualifications: https://www.pediatrics.columbia.edu/profile/dusan-bogunovic-phd https://www.pediatrics.columbia.edu/profile/dusan-bogunovic-... His reputably published, peer reviewed, work can be found here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.adx5758 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.adx5758
ChrisClark 1y ago
[flagged]

inka 1y ago

And the part where he says people with this mutation are more prone to bacterial infections is not worrying, because…? In a world of more and more antibiotic resistant bacteria, that does not seem like a good trade-off…

empath75 1y ago
Probably the issue is microphages being wiped out which allows bacteria to thrive. But you wouldn't take this _all the time_, only when you had a specific viral infection to get rid of.
lotharcable 1y ago
One of the effects of ISG15 deficiency is a disease called "Type I interferonopathy". Among the symptoms of this disease includes things like necrotic lesions and severe multi-systemic damages. From what I gather the fact that these people are not more susceptible to viral infections was a surprise. Which probably relates to why the doctors in the parent article were investigating its possible anti-viral properties.
perlgeek 1y ago
This is researched as a potential treatment to an acute viral infection. For the duration of the treatment, you can accept the increased risk of bacterial infections. Just like you accept the risk of increased yeast infections while treating bacterial infections with antibiotics, or the risk of any infection while treating a cancer with chemotherapy.

hyperliner 1y ago

What is the “current” scientifically approved and unbiased understanding about the negative effects of the COVID vaccines? There seems to be a lot of information, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and information hiding at least in the perception, if not in reality. I cannot imagine what society at large will have to deal with or what the reaction will be for or against an “everything” therapy, given what happened with Covid.

lawlessone 1y ago
>about the negative effects of the COVID vaccines? The biggest negative effect is i've been hearing "you'll be dead in six months from this vaccine" for about 5 years now. It's been 5 years. have you nothing else going on in your life?
- hyperliner 1y ago
  [dead]
estearum 1y ago
The current understanding is that you're 15 to 20 times more likely to suffer severe eye damage from taking Viagra than even the highest risk group (young men) is to encounter a serious adverse effect from the COVID vaccine. The information has not changed dramatically since a few months after its release, and the myocarditis risk was not detected in clinical trials because it is an unbelievably rare event. Detecting it would've required trials orders of magnitude larger than any clinical trial ever.

carlsborg 1y ago

Paper appears to be paywalled. It is however an update to this preprint which is available on Biorxiv: "Broad-spectrum RNA antiviral inspired by ISG15-/- deficiency" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.24.600468v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.24.600468v1 My summary for programmers: When you get a viral infection, immune cells make a signalling protein called a IFN-1 (Type I Interferon) cytokine, and this flips a boolean flag to True on a bunch of genes (interferon-stimulated genes or ISGs) that produce a bunch of proteins (hundreds) that control the infection. ISG15 is one of them and its role appears to be to downregulate and to limit the inflammation. The paper title refers to a ISG15 deficiency, meaning if you are dificient in ISG15 that inflamation limitation goes away. But the paper is actually about how in people that naturally have a ISG15 deficiency, there is an always-on low level expression of some of these pro-inflamation genes. So they take that as a safe level. The did RNA sequencing on experimental ISG15 deficient cells and from heatlhy individuals, identified the mutations, narrowed down to 10 genes (antiviral ones not inhibitors) that in combination significantly inhibited viral replication. They stuck the RNA for such genes in lipid nanoparticles such that they enter host cells, whose ribosomes happily read the RNA like a turing head reads a tape in base 20 and produce proteins encoded by these genes, similar to how the mRNA vaccine works. So why not dose with the IFN-I directly? Three referenced papers show its "poorly tolerated with significant side effects" and all those downregulators that get expressed limit the inflammation response. Disclaimer: IANAB (not a biologist) corrections might be due..

zoeysmithe 1y ago
This is typical of "why not just one drug/treatment" for something big like viruses, cancer, etc. I think we'll never have this "one shot," but continue to find tailored treatments for individual conditions. There's no way out of this complexity with "one simple trick," which seems really appealing to the people who determine what gets popular in social media and seemingly politics now. Its just going to be boring and grueling academia and medical trials that are hard for the layperson to understand, hence the important of funding these programs. The recent right-wing election wins and thus a right-wing government cutting all manner of medical grants is supported by the "one weird trick" crowd. Hopefully, the USA will have better leadership in the future to get us back to actual science and to find actual new treatments. Already, even on HN, the top comments are conspiracy-culture coded, "but, but this one company bought the patent and disappeared with it!" Sigh.

Geee 1y ago

It was already invented [0], but the patents were bought by a small company in New Zealand (some kind of big pharma shell company?) who isn't seriously developing it and now appears to be defunct. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO

ajmurmann 1y ago
Doesn't sound all the bad from the linked wiki: """ In March 2024 Kimer Med announced it has signed a contract valued at up to USD$750,000 (NZD$1.3 million) with Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the world’s largest independent, nonprofit research and development organization. The contract is focused on the discovery and development of new antiviral drug candidates for the treatment of alphaviruses. """
- forgotpwagain 1y ago
  The cynical part of me wonders: if this has been a promising approach for 10+ years, why weren't they able to secure VC funding years ago (or nonprofit biomedical research funding from places like the Gates Foundation that care a lot about infectious disease)?
  - Alex3917 1y ago
    This. Claims of a universal antiviral are as old as western medicine itself. Literally the only reason anyone knows what the Hippocratic oath is is because Hippocrates was already famous at the time for promoting elderberry as the universal antiviral.
    - abeppu 1y ago
      My understanding is that the _concept_ of a virus wasn't even established until the late 19th century, because we first needed the germ theory, and then we needed to understand bacteria well enough to have a filter whose pores were known to be smaller than bacteria could pass through, but which some _other_ infection agent could still pass through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virology#Discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virology#Discovery Hippocrates could recommend elderberry for a bunch of ailments, but he didn't have the concept of a "universal antiviral".

mcculley 1y ago

I always wonder this and maybe people in the comments here know the answer: If humans had the technology to eliminate all viruses on Earth, what would be the outcome? Do viruses keep other bad things in check? Would there be bad consequences if we eliminated all viruses?

ocfnash 1y ago
Most viruses are bacteriophages, so I imagine bacteria would run wild!
- zahlman 1y ago
  Aren't bacteria generally much larger than viruses?
  - karolinepauls 1y ago
    Phages don't devour bacteria, they get inside and hijack them, like viruses tend to do with cells.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      Seems strange to call them that, then; but such is English I suppose.
    - melagonster 1y ago
      Sometimes when phages get enough copies inside bacteria. The host will explode and release all phages inside it.
lotsoweiners 1y ago
Population control.
- aurizon 1y ago
  [flagged]

pelorat 1y ago

I don't think this is a good idea.

ggm 1y ago

Persisting inflammation is not kind to bodies. All kinds of things could go wrong, and longterm consequences are easy to hypothesise. Not saying this isn't worth researching but I'd expect big question marks around risk/reward.

jonny_eh 1y ago
Exactly my thought. There must be a reason that evolution didn't auto-optin us to these proteins. Everything is a trade-off. It's possible with the prevalancy of viruses in the modern world that we would, on balance, benefit from a more vigilant immune system.
andrewflnr 1y ago
I'm guessing the deployment ends up being less mass-population and more "oops, this guy with a viral disease just coughed on me." Though I can easily see long-term, preemptive use being worth the risk for people dealing with, say, ebola patients.
GTP 1y ago
It seems to me that the point is to induce the inflammation only when someone is exposed to a virus or developed a viral infection, not to have a persisting one. Just like you take antibiotics if you get a bacterial infection, but only for the time needed to treat the infection. You don't take antibiotics every day "just in case".

user214412412 1y ago

rfk gonna ban hammer this so fast

cmoski 1y ago

Isn't everyone just drinking bleach these days anyway?

killerstorm 1y ago

Sounds like they are boosting what body already does in case of a viral infection. I wonder how different it is from interferon therapy - interferons are used to signal viral infection, so they also activate immunity.