A backdoor lets the immune system monitor the brain | Hacker News Reader

A backdoor lets the immune system monitor the brain

quantamagazine.org

179 pointstheafh44 comments

As somebody who has a somewhat strange form of Multiple Sclerosis wherein almost all of the damage is in my so-called "water channel" nerves located in my optic nerves and around my brain stem, the observation that pathogens get "swept" into the area of my CNS where most of my lesions occur is very interesting. I've been tested multiple times for neuromyelitis optica, but that's come back negative each time, so it's still officially diagnosed as MS. It's just that my white matter has been completely untouched for the 23 years I've had symptoms, which is really unusual.

Interferon beta worked really well for me, and now Ocrelizumab is doing even better.

I'm convinced that what we call "Multiple Sclerosis" today is actually a collection of distinct conditions with largely orthogonal causes, and just about the best we can do in absence of a more thorough understanding of the issues is nuke all the adolescent B-lymphocytes (which is what Ocrelizumab does).

When last did you perform the tests for NMO? In the last decade quite a few new tests have been developed.

There are two antibody tests you can perform to determine if you have NMOSD; Anti-Mog and Aquaporin-4

My last test for NMO was a little over a year ago. It was definitively negative. I'm responding really well to Ocrelizumab, which my neurologist tells me would probably be what he would treat me with for NMO too, so it's sort of a moot point for me whether it's MS or NMO. Treatment is the same, outcomes are the same.

Here is an interesting fact for anyone who might be reading.

All the medications with the -mab suffix are monoclonal antibodies.

For instance the "monoclonal antibody cocktail" Trump received was casirivimab and imdevimab, made by Regeneron.

Another fun fact: BioNTech, the company that co-developed the mRNA COVID vaccine, applied similar techniques to develop an experimental MS vaccine.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/960371/vaccine-maker-biontech...

Of course if I could have a Bitcoin for every time "autoimmune encephalomyelitis" has been cured in a mouse model I would be set for life!

Do you happen to know an online MS community with folks similar to the HN crowd?

Reddit and Facebook tend to have good communities.

Multiple sclerosis? More like multiple prognosis am I right!?..

Sorry about your condition

Ever been tested for Sjogrens? An autoimmune disorder that attacks fluid producing systems.

> Ever been tested for Sjogrens?

I'll look into it. Although the nerve damage is in the CNS and not peripheral, and I don't have any issues with dry eyes and mouth. Fifteen MRIs and 5 different neurologists have all pegged it as MS.

How on earth do people get this level of nerve testing.

I have severe neuropathy,

I have never even had any test on them done.

> How on earth do people get this level of nerve testing.

Be diagnosed with MS, have really good medical coverage, and live near a highly respected MS expert.

Anyone know if sleep deprivation from sleep apnea causes global, temporary loss of sensation or (permanent) neuropathy?

I lost a large fraction of sensation everywhere. I'm tired af, don't sleep very well or very long, and feel like s#!7.

(Been tested for lupus like 10x.)

Sleep apnea causes a lot of exhaustion and stress. Really hard on body. Getting a cpap was a massive improvement for to my life.

10 years later I was still declining hard. Got diagnosed with Sjogrens, a cousin to lupus.

Ouch. That's no good but glad they narrowed it down. I've always had read areas under my eyes and dry eyes, and now dry skin on my forehead and around my mouth.

Back to OSA: I have tachycardia and hypertension controlled by a beta blocker (propranolol er). Also, depression, ADHD, and (physiological) anxiety. Can't and could never run a mile to save my life. Haha. Could/can do explosive intensity exercises but never anything more than very low intensity like walking or bicycling.

I wondering if I have pulmonary and/or circulation issues on top/because of OSA that limit moderate aerobic exercise capacity. (Heart is unremarkable per 12-lead ECG, stress echo, and catheterization at Stanford Cardiology a few years ago.. actually performs very efficiently under load.)

> The new findings help clarify one detail of Shirai’s 1921 mouse study that never sat well with the naive notion of immune privilege. Shirai found that tumors survived and grew when implanted in some locations in mice’s brains. But when Shirai placed tumors right next to the ventricles — now known to be the locations where the brain produces the fluid that sweeps antigens off to the immune cells — the tumors didn’t survive.

So, the key experiment to reveal this fact was performed one hundred years ago, but overlooked.

I like that it is a literal "back door" in that there's an opening in the barrier at the back of the brain.

Yes, a pretty big oversight by anyone on the design team concerned with security. It just makes it look like humans were yet another product pushed out the door before they were ready for prime time.

Maybe the backdoor has an evolutionary reason to exist. Unlike devs, nature tests its ideas more thoroughly.

When reading old code you can often find some parts that don't make sense, especially if you don't know the original motivation.

I don't know, not every aspect of our biology is an evolutionary advantage. Some just didn't have enough of a negative impact to get weeded out over time. For example we're rather squishy. Considering that built-in armor is a known-feature of other animals, the devs could have added that into the release. Honestly I would expect "not squishy" to have been in the initial human MVP release. I mean, they figured out that the mouth input channel needed to occasionally be used as an emergency output-- they had some idea of what they were doing, but still missed some obvious things.

Then again, if we're being developed by an evolutionary algorithm, why should I assume we're a full version release? It's possible we're still in the alpha stage. Or possibly some other developmental culdesac that just hasn't been pruned yet. We could be one of many incorrect answers to a recursive depth-first search algorithm, each iteration of which uses incremental parameter changes for the input of the evolutionary algorithm. Some dev one level up in the layers of reality might be getting yelled at right now for not using a breadth-first approach, or for using a resource intensive evolution process when the client just needed something "good enough".

Nature's search algorithm, blind as it is, got itself augmented with technology so I expect its trajectory will be different.

Brain region to immune system: I am root.

Immune system: Yes you are, my bad.

or I'm going to call bullshit on that. Put your arms up and prepare for phagocytosis.

Now if only the immune system was open source and not some binary blob we can only interfaced with by giving it fake targets.

It is open source. You can go ahead and download the human genome. You just can't run it because of a lack of efficient simulation, and unlike human-created code the code is both obfuscated and lacks clear separation of intents.

yeah its a code base millions of years old consisting of spaghetti code with no comments written in a turring tarpit of a language that compiles directly to hardware with ridiculous compile times

Yeah, every time someone says I need to believe in God, I tell them that I want to believe, if only to get there and punch them in the face for creating such bullshit :D

To be fair he was under a crunch. He delivered the whole project in a week.

She did it in one sprint without agile development tools or user feedback.

Did this improve the User Experience?

It's a simulation. Should I ask her to hit the reset button and try again to see if 2 sprints makes it any better?

still an amazing delivery. He did it literally from scratch, in one week, and that week included a break on the 7th day.

Must be a programming god.

They actually took a day off. Maybe they should have used the 7th day for UAT and a bug hunt.

In six days. He rested on the seventh day.

Let's not forget all of the endogenous retroviruses (ERVs).

Turing*?

Does it have capitalization and punctuation though?

The GPL makes this "binary" vs "source" distinction by talking about the "preferred form for making changes". Well, the binary blob of DNA happens to be also be the source!

Feel free to publish your genome under an open source license =)

It's open source if you git clone the adaptive part and put it on Github. There's just a bunch of IP restrictions on your own genes because plutocracy. Apache license then?

I lost the compiler though, so it might as well be a binary amoebic blob, but I hear you can throw mRNA at the API to teach it new tricks.

It's totally open source. You just have to learn arcane, out of date methods for interacting with it.

Kind of like someone addressing Y2K by knowing Cobol.

RCS, CVS, or UUCP?

You've exceeded my knowledge of coding suitable to attempt to crack a joke. Maybe you could supply me programmer-speak equivalents of:

1. Fasting

2. Dietary restrictions

3. Sleep hygiene

4. Exercise

5. Actual hygiene

6. Spartanism

>Fasting: stop dicking with the code and lets see if the error reoccurs.

>Dietary Restrictions: I added a new linter! Now you can't commit crappy code!

>Sleep Hygiene: This...sleep thing... You're saying if I learn to lucid dream, I can figure out problems while I sleep?

>Exercise: Yessssss! 100% test coverage.... Wait, are we talking the code, or me?

>Actual hygiene: Keyboards. Are. Disgusting.

>Spartanism: I live in an office with a desk, three screens a chair, and maybe a mat. No, I bear no ill will towards ancient Athens, or the rug... Why do you ask?

"Yes. You should always be working on business problems while you are sleeping under your desk. That's why we pay you the big bucks salary... so your hourly rate is less than a retail store cashier's and your soul is ours... forever! Hahahah."

> Exercise.

Test coverage and typing doesn't count. )': Must. Paump. Zie. Iiron because Hanz und Franz zays zo.

> Keyboards.

We only buy dishwasher-compatible keyboards now and have a dedicated dishwasher for them. The cleaning people collect them every Friday night. https://youtu.be/pgnF42ZoRSw

> arcane, out of date methods

This. is. HN!!! (Kicks messenger into the well)

Smoke signals, telegraph wires, spark gap transmitters then?

We could always put alarm bonfires at the summits of the tallest hills and mountains.

Don't run unsafe code with root. That's common sense lol

Hopefully this will lead to better treatment of brain tumors and other diseases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com