From MIT, a cure for all viruses? | Hacker News Reader

From MIT, a cure for all viruses?

process.org

426 pointsMRonney107 comments

Sounds promising. It'll be interesting to watch and see how this evolves.

Here's an off-topic comment issued in the spirit of constructive criticism for the site (please don't downvote based on this):

If any HN reader has an account with process.org could you --if you agree, of course-- suggest that a small gray font against a gray background is simply not a good idea? On an iPad without zooming it is really straining to read. On a desktop with a 24 inch 1920 x 1200 monitor it is not comfortable. Bad idea. A larger black font would be best.

If website backgrounds really bother you (and surely process.org isn't the only culprit), try using the Reader button in the top bar of Mobile Safari. Or try using ihackernews.com, there's an "Article Text" link that works very well for just showing you the body of an article on a simple white background.

> If website backgrounds really bother you

While I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, your wording deflects blame from the site's retarded text contrast to the GP (robomartin).

(no snark intended)

Yeah, I had to take the time to implement a custom stylish style for the website in firefox before I started reading it.

To prevent having to 'implement custom styling', use Readability (firefox add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readability/) or as for Safari the Reader functionality: http://shrt.nl/s/shot-UD7ba5RjHg.png

CTRL+A can also do the trick.

instapaper read now work well on this and other sites.

readability is good too but they changed to a pay model but I think you can still use the bookmarklette for free.

I read the plos article when it came out. Basically, when a cell realises it is infected with a virus sometimes it will try to kill itself. There are a bunch of checks it does to make sure killing itself is a good idea. Many viruses try to counter these checks. DRACO works by short circuiting the detection -> kill self pathway.

It's a great idea. But sometimes a large proportion of cells can get infected when you have a virus. Someone might get in a lot of trouble if all their infected cells instantly died. Like, can anyone speculate what the side effect would be for an AIDS patient? I don't know myself, but I'd want to know more about this before saying this is a miracle cure.

So is DRACO itself a kind of virus ? How does it visit all the cells...

DRACO is a drug, and travels through the body by diffusion the same way other drugs do.

"Someone might get in a lot of trouble if all their infected cells instantly died."

This was directly addressed in the linked article.

Sounds like a perfect beginning to a real "I am Legend" scenario. Imagine someone releasing a virus that could cross the blood-brain barrier (modified Rabies?) that just infects the cells and causes some minor symptoms that appear to be a standard cold. But anyone who takes this drug will have those brain cells self-destruct right?

I found the author's contention that the cells were about to be killed by the virus anyways fairly convincing, but this is why we have tests in animals first.

If you could infect a target with a designer virus, why not just make it kill them directly? Unless you're the villain in a James Bond movie, of course ;)

Very true. I guess one would have to have some grudge against the company(s) that made this drug in the future and want to prove that it's dangerous with a zombie apocalypse.

This was addressed in the article: almost all viruses kill their host cell anyway, so killing the infected host cell faster doesn't add any risk or harm. Taking the infected cell out of circulation means that a lot fewer cells get infected so it's a net win.

If the infected cells tend to live a long time and the antiviral drug kills them all at once then it's a big difference. To see this, take the idea "to the limit":

Imagine if virus-infected cells lived an average of ten years, that the antiviral drug kills every infected cell in the body instantly, and that every cell in the body is infected. The effect of taking the drug in such an instance would be far worse than letting the virus attack the body unchecked.

Now, this obviously isn't a "reasonable" example, but it does show that there are parameters for which there the drug does harm the patient. Determining whether that risk is actually worth worrying about is a job for science.

Ah, but infected cells are hijacked to do the virus' job rather than the job they are intended for so any killed cells weren't aiding the body.

Thank you for posting this on HN! This is exactly the kind of underreported bleeding-edge engineering I hope to discover on places like HN.

It's very easy for mainstream journalists to jump on new technologies once they've been developed, but it's up to engineers and scientists themselves to make exciting potential directions better known.

Props to the writer for going out an getting the interview on a great story: possible cure for viruses project diagnosed with lethal lack of funding.

But there are some "questions" to not ask in a news interview:

"Oh, wow. That’s an amazing idea."

"There haved been articles, but I feel this is definitely front-page material."

I agree, this is amazing interesting stuff and the interviewer and interviewee made it great. But when you tell me how interesting it is instead of letting the content speak, you set off alarms in my head.

Sorry for being a curmudgeon--it's easy to berate things without contributing. Just saying don't let your opinion overshadow the story.

My all-time favorite link to put in an HN comment is the one I will put here, "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

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

by Peter Norvig, LISP hacker and now director of research at Google.

I hope the preliminary research findings discussed in the interview submitted here are replicated and prove to have clinical benefit for human patients. Finding out whether or not they do will still take much work by other researchers.

For this reason along with many others, I can't be impressed when Bezos spends money raising some rocket motors from the bottom of the ocean while potentially one of the greatest medical accomplishments of humans goes almost unfunded.

hah, great username. I didn't know HN had a chaperon. btw, thanks for posting that link, and thanks to Peter Norvig!

Good rule of thumb: if the title is a question, the answer is no.

First time I've heard that...but I have to say it's basically true.

Sadly, that is mostly due us being over-sensitised to dodgy sales techniques, e.g.

"Is this the best car seat cover ever?"

As discussed in Bertrand Russell’s If the Title is a Question, Is the Answer No?

I came to say the same thing. The moment I see that question mark, the skeptical side of me comes into play.

A good rule of thumb for mainstream media news reporting, but not for blog posts, scientific papers, books, or other such categories.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2832

A superb example.

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

If I could downvote you I would. As a scientist, skepticism is lazy and arrogant.

Are you sure about that?

Go to kickstarter or some other funding method that will NOT patent or copyright this. Something like the JOBS acts would provide. This is too disruptive to have in the hands of big pharma.

Honestly, all of the "non-profit" organizations out there who provide "funding" to AIDS research need to blow the bank and get behind something like this.

It is properly too early to tell, but if this proves to be something real, we need a march of dimes founding situation and we have to make it as much a national issue, and as important as when Jonas Salk headed the team that cured polio.

One thing it will do is it will cure AIDS -- an insanely great achievement -- another thing it will do is that it will inspire a generation of kids to become scientists, which we sorely need.

> It is properly too early to tell, but if this proves to be something real

“Then there are government agencies and companies that will take it and take it to that final step.” The problem is getting to that stage when it proves to be something real.

I "agree".

Kickstarter isn't going to provide the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to take a drug through the FDA approval process.

No?

Well, it'll certainly get them closer.

If it can get a million dollars for a _video game_, you don't think it could get a hundred million to cure all viral disease?

The difficulty, of course, is convincing the donors that the likelihood of success is high; with a video game from a reputable publisher, it's near 1, whereas it's much lower for an experimental drug. But the potential gain is certainly many orders of magnitude greater.

beta.microryza.com

This is pretty cool, but it's so early in the drug -> product process that it's really difficult to get one's hopes up. The article indicates that they're nowhere near clinical trials, which often take 5 years by themselves - and most drugs get weeded out before they even get to this stage.

When I first saw it I though it was fake.

But seriously, PANACEA and DRACO? Is Dr. Todd Rider trolling the crazies?

For example: http://youtu.be/EneiDKw_zXg tl;dr: DRACO is attempt by Reptilians to corrupt human DNA, underwater cages, etc

Oh how insanely great. He makes sure those of us who don't believe that conspiracy gets treatment while those who do are forced to change their minds.

Two birds, one stone. Awesome.

I kept reading the article and looking for something that would give this away as an early April Fools joke.

Thanks for the tl;dr. I found myself unable to continue listening to the narrator's slow, halting, breathy voice.

IMO, and unrelated to this video, it's a good reason to provide a transcript of videos (advice I myself rarely follow) -- people with bad voices (or good voices that inexplicably annoy some people) can still have interesting things to say.

Link to the original research [PDF]:

http://goo.gl/jfAIw

I wonder why this got published in PLoS ONE rather than a more traditional and higher impact journal.

In pathology, it is sometimes hard to publish radical ideas in traditional & high impact journals. They prefer breakthroughs in established approaches.

It's already been going around the public news circuit for a while, and they undoubtedly got some extra support and funding because it did. PLoS ONE publications are much easier for the public to access.

PLoS ONE is far from the most prestigious open access journal, even within the PLoS family. And even non-open access journals typically allow you to pay a couple thousand dollars to make a paper open access.

PLoS ONE is quite a reputable journal, one which some people prefer for philosophical reasons (open access).

Without knowing the submission history of this paper or talking with referees in the big name journals, it's hard to know whether or not they submitted this to one of the other journals and simply didn't get accepted.

I wish more science would get behind crowd funding, then we could potentially have this kind of stuff sooner/at all. I wince at all of the amazing science that doesn't kick off, not because of a lack of feasibility or interest but simply because of a lack of funding.

If you look at the number of ideas that get funded and fail, I would say there is more money out there than good ideas at the moment.

This is great until the fallout is destroying all the potentially "good" viruses with which humans are infected. Little research has been done to determine the good bugs. You can guarantee lots of beneficial viruses will be identified once the adverse affects of their absence begins wreaking havoc.

I came on to inquire precisely that. This would most likely kill the good viruses, too. What are they going to do to counteract those virii death?

I'm guessing they can target the virus RNA they're attempting to eradicate.

What I gathered from the article, though, was that this shortens a cell's self-checks before the cell itself self-destructs. There is no virus RNA being evaluated, that's still done by the cell.

If I misunderstood the article and people's commons in this thread, please help me understand properly.

No, you are correct, sukuriant. The mechanism here is working on the host cell. Which is precisely the point of the article. Past attempts at working on the virus directly have all but failed. That's why this method is so effective and promising. However, its effectiveness is also what makes it so scary.

I've never heard of any 'good' viruses. I think you're applying the analogy of benefiical bacteria to viruses, assuming there must be beneficial viruses as well. In the artcile he somewhat addresses this by saying any cell infected by a virus will be killed at some point regardless, so DRACO wouldn't do any additional damage.

Now, I think you're implying that there might be 'good' viruses that we haven't discovered yet. I feel like if that's the case then other animals would certianly have them as well and we would surely figure that out before we got to human trials.

Bacteriophages are one type of beneficial virus. The way biology goes I wouldn't be surprised if there are 100's/1000's more. The other complication is it's not necessarily binary whether an invasive agent is good or bad. Slightly tangible, but fascinating nonetheless: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/404/e... Listen to the part about hook worms.

Wow, is that real? How is this not front page news on every network? This would be as big as the discovery of antibiotics.

This appeared on reddit a few days ago, and the answer to your question is twofold.

First, this has not yet undergone human testing. In the history of pharmaceuticals, there have been many drugs that performed favorably in animal testing yet failed in human testing. It is simply too early to tell if this drug will be successful in humans.

Secondly, was the idea that eliminating all viruses, as this seems to do, is not the best solution. Our bodies would not get the opportunity to develop resistances in the way the immune system usually does so we would be susceptible to the virus the second time around.

There are many viruses dangerous enough that humans tend to die instead of developing resistance. I think that is enough reason to want this sort of drug around.

It could also make viral gene therapy considerably safer, and generally reduce the potential bioterror risk of having genetics technology around.

Even if the drug had nasty side effects, it would be great as a last resort similar to ultra-powerful "atomic bomb" antibiotics.

So use the drug the second time around, too. It uses a property common to all viruses to work - not something that could be defeated with evolution a lá bacterial infections and antibiotics.

Speaking of which, I wonder if this would stop us using bacteriophages for treating bacterial infections. They show a lot of promise, again, because they're not resilient to evolution of their target bacteria, but they are viruses themselves.

This would be great for viruses that the immune system can't get rid of on its own, like herpes or HIV. For stuff like the common cold, it'd probably be best to let the immune system deal with it (same how you wouldn't use antibiotics for a minor bacterial infection).

The drug kills the cell but the not virus -- your body still has to do that. Given the way that vaccines work, this is probably not going to have a big effect on immunity.

I'm missing a bit of the logic here, then. If I kill the cells infected, won't the latent viruses go and infect a different cell anyway? DRACO appears to be a medical scorched-earth policy.

No, viruses aren't just free floating strands of genetic material, they also have a sort of molecular syringe that they use to get through the cell wall and to protect them in the environment outside the cell. The genetic material itself won't be that dangerous after the cell dies.

With AIDS, for example, it infects a cell and causes that cell to replicate as many copies of the virus as possible (remember viruses don't replicate on their own). The cell eventually ruptures spreading out more copies of the virus to infect more cells. By killing the infected cell as early as possible, you drastically reduce the number of copies produced.

I have a basic understanding of how viruses work at the cellular level. The problem is that DRACO doesn't seem to kill the virus; it stops its propagation. There is a big difference in the way it works from a broad-spectrum antibiotic and seems more damaging.

Let's say you're really sick with the flu -- that means a lot of cells have that virus. The virus replicates and the cell eventually dies and releases hundreds or thousands of viruses.

From how I read this, DRACO stops the process by killing cells that are making the virus once they are infected with the virus. If I don't have an antibody for the virus or I have a bad immune system, DRACO is going to end up killing one cell for every one virus that exists in my circulatory system. DRACO is ineffective on the virus when it is spreading. Yes, it stops the spread so your immune system can catch up, I guess, but what if I'm already really sick?

DRACO made the rounds last fall. Even the article linked to here was from November.

It would be interesting for the author (or someone) to do a follow-up to see if the same apathy is still predominant.

Side note: have mercy on your readers and make the text contrast a bit higher.

This is a very interesting and novel technique, but it brings to mind a very interesting and (to my knowledge) still very much open question in human biology: just what all does RNA do?

Obviously, we know quite a lot about RNAs such as mRNA, tRNA, and rRNA, but until the later part of the 1990s it would have been nearly impossible to predict such things as snRNA, snoRNA, siRNA, miRNA, and RNAi.

Then there's the question of retrotransposons. Could they cause a spurious triggering of DRACO? How active are they and how important is that activity over short time scales (the time scale of an infection, say)? What about long time scales (say, a lifetime of treating illnesses with DRACO)? Unfortunately, retrotransposons are thought to behave very differently in mice than in humans, so if this research doesn't translate to humans, my bet would be that it has something to do this difference.

All that said, this is very creative work and should rightfully be celebrated.

Not to mention viroids - tightly balled RNAs of only a few hundred (220!) nucleotides which, due to the shape they form, coerce replication machinery to reproduce them. Definitely on the very edge of what can be considered "alive".

Edit: that is to say, they don't encode any proteins - they simply loop back on each other and the shape does all the work.

The shape is more important as a container, transporting other silencing RNA or miRNA. People have developed nano cages that act as slippery shells to deliver a payload, and so far some insanely promising results in mammalian cells.

For what it's worth, I think this will be the mechanism for majority of gene based drug delivery in 10 years.

Oh really? cool. It's been a while since I read anything about viroids. They somehow bundle miRNAs?

It's more about using DNA/RNA nanostructures. Imagine a 3d tetrahedron with toehold overhangs made entirely of one strand of DNA/RNA that unravel to deliver the payload. From what I remember, they are soluble through lipid bilayers, making them very effective for delivery.

Imagine a very small 3d hotpocket that can deliver small siRNA or miRNA. Even better, you can program a signal amplification or another message into the structure itself, e.g. joining other structures to form lock-key mechanisms like legos.

Here's the MITLL press release: http://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html

Very interesting. I did my honours research in engineering grasses (Medicago) with a complementary RNA to a commonly occurring virus in order to trigger a similar defense. Unfortunately, somehow a few generations later the plants just stopped expressing those genes.

Plants don't have an immune system per-say but they do actively defend against double stranded RNA.

It seems that DRACO works by binding double-stranded RNA. This will work for many, but not all, viruses. Viruses can also have single stranded RNA genomes, like influenza, as well as single- and double-stranded DNA genomes, like herpes. Optimistically, this is s cure for a subclass of viruses.

Did you read the article? It's not related to the virus's genome, it's related to the RNA that genome produces, which the interviewee contends is always doublestranded. In fact they specifically address DNA viruses and herpes.

I'll wait for human trials but I love their ballsy acronym for now:

PANACEA (Pharmacological Augmentation of Nonspecific Anti-pathogen Cellular Enzymes and Activities)

its interesting although one potential twist is that viruses may be more the communications vector for genetic material than the actual disease causing process itself (which is the payload).

if this gets widely used in the field, will it disrupt "good" things - evolutionary processes, symbiotic infections, etc?

Will it disrupt the ability of manmade viruses (i.e. gene therapy) from working?

I have no idea but I am curious as well. The one thing that did stick out was he said it only lasted 48 hours in the body. So presumably, if you were doing something after it left the body, it would have no effect (assuming it works as intended).

In the article the idea of bioengineering Draco into the body was mentioned. My understanding is that in the early stages of pregnancy there's some very weird stuff going on in mammals that appears to involve endogenous retro-viruses. It might be that mammals came into being partly as a result of some reptile having a viral infection that got into some sperm or egg cells. That wouldn't be a reason not to use it as a drug, but the world of biology is very weird and the systems are open in a way computers are not. Viruses have been around for a very long time and like bacteria are embedded into the environment in ways that like fish in water we won't notice until they go away.

Ah, I forgot that about that part. It were engineered into us that is an interesting and very different scenario than what I was thinking of (simply taking it to cure/remove/kill viruses)

Viruses do indeed communicate genetic material between bacteria and contribute to their evolution. Generally humans don't want evolution occurring within our non-gamete cells, when that happens its usually a cancer. Some people have hypothesized that there might be other sorts of symbiotic viruses in humans, but none have been observed so far. On the the other hand we do know of some animals that do have actual symbiotic relationships with viruses[1].

Generally, I imagine that if we give someone manmade viruses we wouldn't give them this drug at the same time.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydnavirus SFW, but don't read the text if you have a weak stomach.

But do we need to cure all viruses? Do we know that all are hostile to humans?

No, but if you get a really bad viral infection, you don't have to hope that there is a drug around that has been developed to kill that particular disease. You can just take this drug and know that it will cure you.

As far as I'm aware viruses don't do anything positive for humans, though they can swap genes around and so allow bacteria to evolve more quickly. This is in sharp contrast to antibiotics where we really do rely on a huge number of symbiotic bacteria. So it seems that anti-virus drugs are a much safer thing than the antibiotics we already use.

I was slightly baffled and then amused to read the phase

  "And can you take it up to monkey here [at MIT]?".

It took me a moment to work out what that meant (even though I could have read the next sentence for a clue).

Well, sad thing is humans have been creating most of the diseases that have been released into the wild for the past 50 years...

Lyme disease, H1N1(now H1N5-X), etc...

The reason they do NOT cure diseases is because, overpopulation would explode. Cancer isn't cured for this reason but, they certainly love money for a whole bunch more research. The same can be said with HIV/AIDS.

You may think its absurd or wrong in concept but, do the math for yourself...

You think 10-billion people by 2020 is a large number...

If they cured even a single major disease(like cancer), 10-billion would be 20-billion by 2030...

It's an interesting thing to know that humans are responsible for killing ourselves only because, they won't fund technologies for space travel & transforming.

Enjoy being slaves on this watery rock.

;-)

Your reply is surely in jest.However, if it was not, the Iceman who lived 5,000 years had Lyme disease.

"Perhaps most surprising, researchers found the genetic footprint of bacteria known as Borrelia burgdorferi in his DNA—making the Iceman the earliest known human infected by the bug that causes Lyme disease."[1]

[1]http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/11/iceman-autopsy/hal...

> the Iceman who lived 5,000 years had Lyme disease

I think you mean the iceman who lived 5,000 years ago, otherwise woah!

Pre-coffee comment. Thanks for the proof read.

Yep, all medical science researchers worldwide are in on a plot to curb population growth for profit. Definitely.

Sarcasm ^

Company start-up name ... maybe ... Umbrella Corporation

Is Paul Graham going to put money for a start-up pharma to mass produce this if this deems to be silver bullet as it claims to be? I smell a lot of money!

Holding the patent on this, once approved by the FDA, will make you able to roll in money for as long as you want.

But getting there will cost an insane amount of money. Far more than YC will ever get. It is more money than any of the VCs have, though they may have enough if you combine the three or four biggest.

And even then the drug may fail.

Oh Draco, you do get your reward for not going over to the dark completely...

I'm not accepting this real until a respected news network investigates it. That and the fact that they didn't seem to spell check / proof-read it first makes me suspicious.

"respected news network" at least from my point of view, this is a bit of an oxymoron, call me paranoid, but I'll take a good peer reviewed academic paper for my facts any day.

Wait, seriously? I thought you were being sarcastic until I read the second sentence. Mainstream news networks in infamously bad at evaluating the accuracy of scientific research, and often end up reporting ridiculous things even if they're drawing inspiration from valid science.

The way to evaluate the validity of normal scientific research is typically to see if any respectable research journal has published it. And as far as I can tell PLOS counts as a respectable journal. Before you really start believing the results you want to look for other people duplicating the results, but publication itself means that yes, this is serious.

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