Protein that destroys HIV discovered

http://www.loyolamedicine.org/News/News_Releases/news_release_detail.cfm?var_news_release_id=973441241

by ca98am79 • 16 years ago

122 69 16 years ago

bhiggins• 16 years ago

Here's a good Wikipedia article on the protein. The gene for this protein is in humans, it just doesn't target HIV in humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM5alpha

aspiringsensei• 16 years ago

> Using a $225,000 microscope

I saw a microscope for sale at best buy for $40! This is waste, pure and simple!

edit: Either I'm not funny or people don't get sarcasm. Probably the former.

whakojacko• 16 years ago

or this isnt reddit

Ardit2020• 16 years ago

Or this is just a different kind of reddit. Just as useless as the previous kind, for humans only make both.

bond• 16 years ago

Hope they have the funding to speed up the process. This is really encouraging...

mathgladiator2• 16 years ago

Very encouraging especially for the late night orgies!

lsb• 16 years ago

Or for a young sub-Saharan girl raped by a man who believes that sex with a virgin will cure him.

martyhu• 16 years ago

Or some sort of data-driven machine learning algorithms to do the testing.

mrlase• 16 years ago

Haven't had a chance to read through the article yet, but here it is via ScienceDirect for all those interested: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.virol.2010.06.015

You'll need a subscription to Virology to view it or institutional access though.

freesciencenow2• 16 years ago

Paywalls for scientific research are evil.

http://209.20.67.195/misc/sastri-identification.pdf

(I intend to do this regularly; see bio.)

Ardit2020• 16 years ago

Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research.

Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

sprout7• 16 years ago

Most researchers haven't really chosen to charge for their papers. It's the only way to get published in the journals, and it's based on an old scarcity where the distribution of quality journals was a difficult task. Now a social network of scientists could handle it for almost nothing. Barriers to research do nothing but make life difficult for poor college students.

See http://arxiv.org.

jonknee3• 16 years ago

> Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

Sure, as long as I developed the application with taxpayer money I think it would be fair game to have it freely distributed. From the article:

> The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

I wish the NIH and others would require free distribution for papers originating out of publicly funded research.

akshayubhat• 16 years ago

     Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research.

>> No, Public interest in research is what keeps funding higher.

     Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

>> Researchers publishing papers dont earn a penny, the only thing that they get is free (no charge to researcher) dissemination. In fact a lot of researchers post a free version on there own web site.

I have published two papers in journal published by American Chemical Society and authors are allowed to put up pre-publication / non edited copy of their papers on their own website. ACS also provides a link from which upto 50 visitors can download the authors paper for free in first year and there is no limit after first year.

E.g. http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/download.pl?ie0704647/P8Lu is free link to my first paper, the article is behind the firewall but if you use above link, you can get it for free.

tocomment• 16 years ago

If you really want to free research you should do this:

Investigate whether there is an inverse correlation between the freeness of the journal a paper is published in and its popularity (number of citations?). You should control for the reputation of the journal since that could throw off the results.

If you find such a correlation and get it publicized, perhaps that would encourage more researchers to submit to free journals.

aphyr3• 16 years ago

Impact factor (# of citations per article in journal) tends to be lower for free journals, since a.) the threshold for publication tends to be lower, and b.) the established journals still have prestige, which largely remains the currency on which scientific reputations and tenure are built. Because most of the big journals don't allow you to retain publication rights after publishing with them, anyone who does big-impact research worthy of publication in those journals faces an exclusive choice between prestige, exposure, and selectivity, or opening their work to the public at the cost of "devaluing" their work. It's a real dilemma--one which publishers are trying to exploit for all they can.

The picture is changing (look at the amazing success of the Arxiv), but I think for-profit, paywalled journals are going to be alive and kicking for quite a while.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Hehe, 'DON'T pay the knowledge cartels' put in to practice.

mhb5• 16 years ago

Is a $225K microscope supposed to be expensive or inexpensive for achieving this? Seems weird to mention that in the introduction. Why not include that they work in a $10M research building?

Ardit2020• 16 years ago

Because we have not heard of a $225K microscope before - thus the microscope must be well good - but have heard of $10M research building and actually expect the latter.

mhb5• 16 years ago

I'm sure the vast majority of the readers of this article have also not heard of a $10K, $100K or $700K microscope either which is why it's incongruous to have the price in the first sentence of the article without any context.

Here are many other microscopes the prices of which you may not have heard. Is it enlightening?

http://www.technicalsalessolutions.com/

InclinedPlane4• 16 years ago

This isn't news, nor is it necessarily even exciting. There are thousands upon thousands of chemicals that destroy HIV (bleach is a good example), the tricky bit is working within the confines of the human body. Delivery, dosing, etc, etc, etc. As far as drug efficacy is concerned, those issues far outweigh anything else.

Unless you are a drug researcher, ignore news of this sort, when you start seeing drug trials then you can start paying attention.

Ardit2020• 16 years ago

I have not heard of any experiments being carried out in monkeys with bleach which showed positive results.

I do not see what your point is. Is this not something new, hence news, but something well know to the mysterious field of drug researchers?

InclinedPlane4• 16 years ago

Ah, precisely, the lab is not the human body. The fact that you can kill HIV with X in the lab is meaningless. Bleach does a quite adequate job of that. However, we care about in vivo efficacy, and that's qualitatively a different problem. For every thousand drugs that seem promising in isolation in a petri dish (e.g. killing cancer cells and not damaging human tissue) perhaps only a handful make it to human trials, and then not all of those prove effective (or completely safe).

If every new substance that killed HIV or cancer in the lab made the news then you would not have time to read about anything else, there are more than you could imagine. Substances at the "kills X in the lab" stage are generally only of concern to researchers, because the chances that they'll turn into a "cure" are extremely low.

Buying a lottery ticket isn't news. Winning the lottery is. This sort of thing is the former, not the latter.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Apparently air works pretty well, too. http://www.sfaf.org/aids101/transmission.html

zeteo• 16 years ago

The catch is, I guess, that the chemical here is a protein. We already have TRIM5a in our bodies, it's just not the right allele. Unlike the antiviral action of bleach, this is a mechanism that already works within the bodies of other primates (rhesus monkeys).

Among other possible developments, this might prove the killer application for gene therapy, which has made steady progress in recent years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy

muriithi• 16 years ago

You may be right. More info in this reddit comment; http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d4lhp/protein_that_...

dnautics• 16 years ago

Cute, but one way of thinking of it is that "the human version doesn't kill HIV". The other way of thinking about it is, "HIV has already evolved to avoid it".

Protein that destroys HIV discovered

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