MIT and the Demise of the Viral Infection

http://blog.readingthinkingandwriting.com/?p=500

by exabrial • 13 years ago

38 28 13 years ago

blog.readingthinkingandwriting.com

zapdrive• 13 years ago

"Sadly though, the one grant the team has from the National Institute of Health is only sufficient to support one full-time researcher."

How much does it take to pay a researcher? I am sure if we drop 0.0001% lesser bombs on Afghanistan/Iraq/and elsewhere, we would be able to support more researchers for this noble cause.

sukuriant2• 13 years ago

Viruses are weird. I want cures to these diseases as much as the next person; but a "broad anti-viral"? What about the good viruses?

kornork• 13 years ago

I stopped reading when the author said there weren't good viruses so it should be ok to indiscriminately kill them.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Yeah! What about the rights of viruses! PeTA will be all over this!

Hah, but seriously, we aren't even sure if viruses should be considered "alive" yet. On a scale of marble statue to flesh-and-blood human, viruses are automaton.

podperson• 13 years ago

Read TFA which addresses this point in several respects.

From my skimming of the article:

1. Viruses are believed to have had a beneficial effect (or an effect of some kind) on human evolution.

2. Viruses are mainly bacteriophages and it's possible that "good" viruses keep some bacterial populations in check, but no studies have thus far found this in human beings, although it appears to be true of seawater.

3. The antiviral in question is broken up by the body in a few days, so any increase in bacterial populations that might result from the antiviral would probably be short-lived.

sukuriant2• 13 years ago

Agreed. So, it will be interesting to see if the generic anti-viral negatively effects us as a species; and what we'll do about it.

DenisM• 13 years ago

The article addresses that - while there are good bacteria, there aren't any known good viruses (sp?).

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Well, unlike bacteria, to my understanding there's only a couple varieties of operational mechanisms for viruses (e.g. RNA virus vs. DNA virus). They bind to a variety of receptors and all that, but it seems like there is far more variety in bacteria, so it isn't surprising an effective anti-viral would be fairly broad in nature.

disclaimer: not a microbiologist.

AnthonyMouse• 13 years ago

>What about the good viruses?

I think the idea is that you only take this when you have a serious "bad" virus, in which case you don't care. If you have a sufficiently bad viral infection, "but it kills the good viruses" is kind of irrelevant when the alternative is being dead.

People always like to talk about the cure for the common cold, and maybe this is it if the consequences of killing good viruses are sufficiently minor, but what this really seems to be is a cure for the likes of HIV.

joghSturgot• 13 years ago

While this works in tissue culture...how one would get a protein into every cell in our body is an interesting challenge...One that is much more challenging than the author of the blog seems to think.

Gatsky2• 13 years ago

They gave it to mice in the actual study, and it still worked.

exabrial• 13 years ago

I found this research to be incredibly interesting and hacker-like! He essentially didn't try to re-invent the wheel, or break ground with genetic design... Instead, he took well-understood pieces of biology and created a mashup previously unthought of!

And yes, viruses are important for evolution! But having a cure for Colds, flus, and various STDs, that kill thousands would be an amazing achievement. I'm hoping we see this sort of therapy come to market in our lifetime

SCAQTony• 13 years ago

Reversed out type is so hard to read. If you are going to insist on a black background please use green type.

bcoates• 13 years ago

Pharmaceutical industry scientist and blogger Derek Lowe put up a post about DRACO in 2011: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/08/22/dracos_new_a...

He generally positive about it (uncommon for him) but points out some likely difficulties for real-world human use.

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

Somehow this reads like every pitch I've ever heard for funding a perpetual energy machine. If you can cure the common cold you don't need funding, just like if you can make energy out of nothing you don't need funding.

viraptor2• 13 years ago

They can't do that yet. As far as I understand, their idea works when applied directly / on a micro scale, but they'd have to still solve the issues of mass production and distribution through the organism.

Anyway, this seems very different from a perpetual energy machine pitch. If you can reject what they're doing using very basic rules of physics/biology, please do that. If you disagree that what they work on is possible, which part is it?

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

Now believe me, I am not picking on you, I'm sharing my reasoning here.

Lets tease these two things apart :

"As far as I understand, their idea works when applied directly / on a micro scale"

So on the micro scale, with direct application, there are literally hundreds of things which kill the common cold virus. My favorite happens to be soap.

But you and I would never believe that soap was some new cure for the common cold because we have a (hopefully) good relationship with soap, and we know that nobody that had their mouth washed out with soap for swearing in class suddenly had a cold clear up.

" they'd have to still solve the issues of mass production and distribution through the organism."

This is the "tricky bit" like the thermodynamics are often the villain of free energy schemes. Mass production isn't a problem because once we get to the point where mass production is the only step between product and market there will be infinite money available. The "distribution through the organism" is a problem. People who solve that problem for a variety of drugs, people like Alza, are worth billions of dollars because it is a problem.

The common theme in miracle cure and endless energy proposals is that they can't avoid reality. We joke about the difference between theory and practice, this is it.

I read a really earnest pitch about a car which used Titanium Dioxide (massively abundant! really cheap!) the fact that ultraviolet light (in sunlight) can split water into hydrogen and oxygen when it shines on water that is in contact with Titanium dioxide [1], and a car with a sunroof of water sloshing around that has a UV transparent top and a bottom painted with Titanium Dioxide creating free oxygen and hydrogen that is to be recombined in a fuel cell to power the car and get turned back into water.

It all works, fuel cells, titanium dioxide splitting water, making electricity and electric cars. The problem is that there is only so much energy in sunlight, 1kW per square meter at the best of times, and a car roof is at best a square meter of surface area, and the typical car power plant, even in golf carts, is at least 15kW. So no matter what you do, there isn't enough light to fuel up your car. That said you could park it for a month, and then perhaps drive it around for the day, but really useful? Not so much.

These guys have found another way to kill viruses. Their technique has some benefits (like soap) in that viruses won't develop immunity to their method. So to figure out a way to transport their method into a living mammal without doing damage to the mammal requires some mice and inspiration, and very little money. If you are engineering a solution (where the mice are just test cases not part of the experiment directly) you can use cheap mice, if you want to publish you probably want a line of genetically bred mice and they are more expensive but not more than a few thousand dollars. Once you figure that step out you have two parts of the treasure map. Now you move up to pigs or if your feeling lucky, monkeys. That gets a bit more expensive but still not "omg where am I going to find the money" expensive. At USC the bio guys were getting $50,000 grants to come up with microbes that were better at eating paper. They ran a full chemistry lab for a school year on that kind of money. If you have a great idea you can save your pennies (its not going away if its real) and fund yourself for that level of investment.

So in these kinds of pitches, its never "we just need money" it is always we need a solution to this insoluble problem. The money just keeps them in noodles while they bang their head against the wall.

[1] http://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/news/science-news/201...

Gatsky2• 13 years ago

This extremely verbose article makes the whole thing sound vaporous by not really discussing the actual data. The journal article itself is a much better read.

Any drug needs careful study and regulatory approval, so you do kinda need some funding... If it really works well and has few side effects and you want to get it to market in under 10 years, then maybe 300 million would be sufficient...

tokenadult• 13 years ago

The obligatory link for any discussion of a speculative plea for research funding like that is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Check each submission to Hacker News you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the submission.

viraptor2• 13 years ago

Does anyone actually know how can we donate to that research? The whole thing seems to be very poorly coordinated. I got very excited about previous news regarding DRACO. Now I see even more news and I'm basically at the "shut up and take my money" stage. It's the first time ever I'd be happy to donate right away...

And here's where the things break down. Where's a paypal button? Where are the bank details? Where's more information?

"If more than 10,000,000 people can contribute to the re-election campaign of a certain President of the United States, just think what we can do with DRACO." Sure we can. But here's the problem:

google: "draco research donate" - give up after 30 min with no relevant results

google: "obama donate" - first link is to https://contribute.barackobama.com/

Now please! Help me help you. Give me a chance to donate something.

seldo• 13 years ago

Previous coverage of DRACO on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771214 (March 2012)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847675 (August 2011)

I believe there were some earlier threads as well but I'm not finding them in a cursory search.

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

Hah! Check it out, negative karma for the win: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847982

So this is old news which I completely missed (I should have scrounged around Google Scholar for the paper, if you are wondering here it is: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...) No further results in 2 years?

kunai• 13 years ago

Quick! Everyone create startups to fund DRACO!

In all seriousness, however, this looks very promising and if true, is perhaps the most influential and important discovery in decades.

kimura• 13 years ago

A good start would be to put this on kickstarter.

ForHumanity2• 13 years ago

I would like to thank you all for reading my article. I have spent most of my life thus far in technology, coding since I was 10. This was back when the TI99/4a was news and 32k was alot of elbo room.

About 14 years ago I decided to study Neuroscience so I could build a better human/computer interface. Little did I know that I was igniting a latent passion for the biosciences that would consume my free time hence forth and thousands of dollars.

I related quickly to the biosciences because molecular physiology bears a striking semblance to computer/software architecture.

Now, I have had an article published on my proposed targeted cancer therapeutic (http://blog.readingthinkingandwriting.com/?p=411) and I have turned my focus to Dr. Rider's work at MIT to end viral infections of all types.

http://blog.readingthinkingandwriting.com/?p=500

The expectations of Dr. Rider with regard to targets of DRACO include HIV, and I would ask that anyone who reads my article pays close attention. I have attempted to relay the science behind the reason I have concluded that Dr. Rider's work will be historic. And I hope I have done just that, though I apologize for where I've failed.

Tissue penetration is addressed by the mouse models... and, from the way our immune system operates. Where an infection resides, molecules are spread that increase vascular permeability and constrict draining vessles thus concentrating blood volume. This is essentially how any medicine acts with specifitcity to the location of infection and what assures DRACO will hit target cells.

Further research in Dr. Rider's lab has shown that not only does DRACO succesfully induce the destruction of infected cells, but that it also reduces the viral titres (quantity of the virus).

I'm happy to answer any further questions.

ForHumanity2• 13 years ago

Thanks to everyone again, especially Exabrial for posting my article here. If anyone has any questions, please post them and I will address them or ask Dr. Rider for a response.

I was hoping someone might be able to point me to another site where I could post my article that would result in as many eyes coming for a look.

As to Tokenadult's comment... the article isn't a plea for funding, it is an attempt to get DRACO into the public's mind. However, myself and a few others have come together to search for a way to fund Dr. Rider's work. So, this post, is a plea for funding. We will have a site up soon as we have found a way to fund his research. We have no desire for financial reward for ourselves, we simply want the full potential of his work explored... rapidly.

MIT and the Demise of the Viral Infection

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