DRACOs may be a cure for all viral diseases

As far as I understand there currently only exist a few animal lab studies that indicate this treatment works. Especially in these preclinical settings many studies turn out to be not reproducible. But even if they are, there's a very long way to a treatment in humans.

The fact that he explicitly is saying this could treat ALL viral diseases makes me skeptical. Maybe I'm wrong, and most viruses produce dsRNA in some form or another during infection.

and he has exactly one paper, and it's in PlOS One.

Yawn.

what it is: they made a poison which will kill a cell when two-parts of the poison touch each other in a certain way (think bubble gum in mission impossible). They've designed the parts of the poison so it should only trigger when a virus is present.

why no big pharma compnay will touch it: the criterion for "virus present, KILL CELL" is potentially highly highly error prone, could easily go haywire killing all the cells.

Contrast to Immunotherapy -- the state of the art in clinically approved cancer treatments which uses the body's own immune system to selectively kill cancer cells (which also faced significant finanical barriers to its development), even if the signal goes haywire, the body's immune system still has fail-safes to not killing all of its own cells.

disclaimer: i am not a biologist, but i took some basic college bio courses

From wikipedia: "Differentiation between infected and healthy cells is made primarily via the length and type of RNA transcription helices present within the cell. Most viruses produce long dsRNA helices during transcription and replication. In contrast, uninfected mammalian cells generally produce dsRNA helices of fewer than 24 base pairs during transcription. Cell death is effected via one of the last steps in the apoptosis pathway in which complexes containing intracellular apoptosis signaling molecules simultaneously bind multiple procaspases. The procaspases transactivate via cleavage, activate additional caspases in the cascade, and cleave a variety of cellular proteins, thereby killing the cell."

From the paper (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/asset?id=10.1371%2F...) :

"In its simplest form, a DRACO is a chimeric protein with one domain that binds to viral dsRNA and a second domain (e.g., a procaspase-binding domain or a procaspase) that induces apoptosis when two or more DRACOs crosslink on the same dsRNA. If viral dsRNA is present inside a cell, DRACOs will bind to the dsRNA and induce apoptosis of that cell. If viral dsRNA is not present inside the cell, DRACOs will not crosslink and apoptosis will not occur."

A big problem is certainly funding, but also how the funding is spent. We are seeing researchers paying 3-4x for the exact same item.

[1] https://labspend.com/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00705-015-2392-4

DRACO, double-stranded RNA activated caspase oligomerizer, is a broadly applicable antiviral technology that has been under development at a slow pace for quite some time now. You might recall some publicity back in 2011, for example, but that marked the results of years of earlier work. DRACO attacks infected cells, not the viruses themselves, following the principle of finding a common vulnerability to target rather than trying to tailor therapies to every different variety of attacker. Despite technology demonstrations to show effectiveness against a broad range of very different types of virus, and the fact that this technology can in principle be applied to near any type of virus, there is next to no ongoing funding for DRACO. It stands as an example of the fact that you can build a better mousetrap and still have the world ignore you. In this case DRACO is languishing despite grave concerns regarding spreading viral resistance to existing drugs, and billions devoted to constructing new drugs that are just more of the same.

Advocacy and philanthropy are often the only ways forward for a new medical technology that is a radical departure from the present status quo. This is a lesson to keep in mind when we talk about the various branches of medical research. It is hard to obtain funding in the life sciences in any meaningful fashion, and the organization of funding for any ongoing serious effort has become a baroque effort involving many players, all of whom are operating with perverse incentives that only serve to slow down progress and make funding less effective on a dollar for dollar basis. For example the large funding bodies are extremely risk-averse, and thus almost never fund the most important early-stage and high-risk projects, the science that is actually science, at the forefront and involving new discoveries. These funding bodies only ever put money into ongoing development wherein which the researchers can already demonstrate proof of concept and an understanding of the mechanisms involved. Getting to that point for any new line of research requires creative accounting and the help of philanthropic donations, and even so there is far too little actual science taking place in major laboratories.