Black Plague and HIV resistance in Europe

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-03/uol-bdw031005.php

by aswanson • 19 years ago

8 14 19 years ago

rms4• 19 years ago

It is incorrect to say that the CCR5 delta32 mutation came exclusively from the plague. It is more likely that it came from smallpox.

The title of this article is even worse, ~10% of people of European descent are resistant to HIV and 10% of those individuals are practically immune to HIV. The mutation is more common in people of northern European descent and some eastern European ethnic groups, like Ashkenazi Jews.

This summary of a paper published in Nature shows that mice with the CCR5 delta32 mutation still get the plague. http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_... Subscription/university tunnel required for the real paper.

This is another study concluding that smallpox was the more likely selecting factor for the mutation. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=29... http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=12...

This is a personal interest of mine because testing for this mutation is my startup. http://www.hivgene.com There's an enormous amount of untapped potential with the CCR5 receptor; I wish I had the money to do private research.

To cure HIV: Start with some adult stem cells from the HIV patient to be treated, specifically the stem cells that produce T cells. Introduce the 32 base pair deletion in the CCR5 gene and grow the cells in culture. These can then be "transplanted" back into the patient. These transplanted stem cells will create HIV immune T cells. Once there are enough immune T cells, the patient will probably still have HIV, but it will not develop into AIDS. There will be no chance of rejection since they are the patient's own cells. Furthermore, since the body does produce antibodies to HIV, these modified T cells may even be able to fight off the HIV.

To test this, we would get a mouse line, which are genetically very similar to each other from inbreeding so we won't have to worry about rejection of the transplants, and introduce the human CCR5 receptor into them. This, in theory, will allow the mice to be infected with HIV since HIV attaches to the CCR 5 receptor to enter and infect the cell. If this works, we can then try the technique of taking some of their stem cells, introducing the mutation, transplanting them back in, and see if their T cell count increases or if the levels of HIV decrease. It could also be used as a preventative therapy, which we can also easily test on the mice.

(HIV curing idea is courtesy of my partner, his username is ingenium on here. If anyone with money is interested in branching out into a different kind of biotech company, please get in touch with me.)

aswanson4• 19 years ago

Why are you not pursuing NSF funding for this research? I am nowhere near as informed as you on this but there has to be money out there to pursue this investigation if what you say has even a small chance of working.

rms4• 19 years ago

It's an intimidating and overwhelming process. Josh (ingenium) and I went to a multi-week university seminar for faculty spinning off research into commercial ventures and the speaker on NSF grants said that it's really tough to get government grants without hiring a consultant who knows the ins and outs of the system. This will be something to do as soon as we have a spare $10,000, but we don't have any spare capital for now.

We also need a PhD on board... we haven't looked for a faculty sponsor because if we get someone from the University of Pittsburgh on board, Pitt owns all of our IP. Pitt has a much worse IP policy than many other large universities; PG and I had this discussion a while ago on here and he posted the link for MIT's tech transfer policy which was much more reasonable.

Basically, Josh and I aren't qualified to lead the research, in the eyes of the government. But Josh is pretty good at what he does and I am confident we could lead a team of Biology PhDs pretty well. They have really low salaries in Pittsburgh too, $40,000 is the starting salary for a post-doc and $100,000 and a pittance of equity would get you anyone you wanted that didn't have tenure at a university.

You can also only get NSF/NIH funding if it has been posted as a "Funding opportunity" or "Funding notice." They don't take unsolicited ideas; they say in advance what ideas they are funding. I hadn't looked at these for a while and I see we may have just missed one that may have been relevant. It's not exactly the idea above and I really don't know if the process is flexible enough to allow for our adult stem cell treatment. http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-AI-07-014.h...

It seems to me that Josh and I aren't going to be able to get government funding without handing our IP over to the University of Pittsburgh, and I have no desire to have to deal with academia. So that means we need to wait until we are independently wealthy to start researching. I also feel that we kind of have a moral prerogative to get research in this area moving forward, and I'm not sure what else we can be doing. We've casually mentioned this treatment technique to various PhDs and MDs and they unanimously say "Yes, that could work." However, they don't say "That's the best idea I've ever heard and I'm going to get be your Principal Investigator for an NIH grant."

Can you think of anything else we could be doing? For now, we're just bootstrapping our genetic testing company and seeing where that takes us.

ingenium• 19 years ago

Slight correction, we'd have to introduce other human receptors that HIV binds to, not just the human CCR5 receptor. It's still not that difficult though, we can put them all on the same plasmid. New techniques, such as magnetofection (http://www.chemicell.com/products/Magnetofection/Magnetofect...) should allow almost 100% transfection (inserting a plasmid, or circular piece of DNA, into a cell) rate. Granted, this is all still theoretical and there may be something I am overlooking, but I still feel it's worth pursuing.

kevingc• 19 years ago

How does this solution address HIV transmission to uninfected individuals?

michaelneale2• 19 years ago

I don't think this is appropriate for hacker news. reddit.com is a better place for stuff like this.

rms4• 19 years ago

Why do you think this?

The intention of Hacker News was not to combine Startup News and programming.reddit.com. I don't think there is any controversy about the relevance of pure science on this site.

michaelneale2• 19 years ago

I am a little frustrated by the ability to not vote things down (hence the need to make a negative comment).

Also, I have no idea why I commented on this story. I must have had mouse parallax error and clicked on the wrong one. I was outside in the sun (at a cafe) and there was a bit of glare, but it definitely was NOT this story that I intended to comment on.

aswanson4• 19 years ago

You might want to try this guy. He has no shortage of capital and seems to be moving his company in that direction:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._E._Shaw_%26_Co.

aswanson4• 19 years ago

Sorry, click on the 'new architectures for a new biology' on that Stanford link. It only gave me the root url.

Black Plague and HIV resistance in Europe

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