Some cynic should really do a web site that just follows up on all miracle cures that flash by the feeds.
Let's say take the top viral cure each week, and follow up how it's developing each anniversary. It could actually be really interesting, if done well.
Yep, they usually use a pseudo virus that doesn't replicate, called an adeno associated virus. Check out this guys video on his own gene therapy for lactose intolerance : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY
Yep, adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors seem very promising. Depending on the type of vector used, you can target the eye, joints, liver, lungs, etc. [1]. Relatively recently, the FDA approved the first AAV-based therapy for a rare retinal disorder [2].
Also worth checking out are some promising trials for treatment of severe hemophilia using AAV vectors [3]. These might end up being great, because the current gold standard treatment involves giving people regular injections of recombinant clotting factor protein, which is even more expensive than gene therapy. Plus, with gene therapy, you have one treatment that lasts a long time, versus having to get an infusion of the treatment regularly.
llamas produce very small antibodies that can attack the parts of the virus that are further inside, and these parts do not mutate as often as the outer parts, which our antibodies generally attack. The outer parts mutate pretty quickly, meaning that any vaccine or treatment that we normally provide only works for a short time.
The really terrible pop-sci write-up says because the antibodies are smaller. The actual publication doesn't given a reason for using llamas. The rationale discussed doesn't hold together, either, since nothing in the study is about "small ab penetrating deeper."
To quote the actual study:
"Moreover, most vaccine-induced antibodies are directed against the highly variable head region of hemagglutinin (HA) and are strain specific. However, broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) targeting influenza HA have been isolated and characterized (8). Several bnAbs have entered clinical trials as therapeutic agents, but their use in influenza prophylaxis remains elusive because of the incomplete coverage against circulating human influenza A and B viruses, which necessitates administration of a bnAb cocktail, and the need for multiple, high-dose injections for protection throughout the entire influenza season. High serum bnAb levels are required because of poor distribution to the upper airways. We present an alternative strategy for long-lasting protection in which single-domain antibodies (sdAbs) (9) with influenza A or B reactivity are linked together into a multidomain antibody (MDAb) and expressed at the nasopharyngeal mucosa through the intranasal administration of a recombinant adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector (10, 11) encoding the MDAb transgene."
Their whole point was to take Ab that target highly-conserved regions and link them together into a, let's call it, multi-tool ab that has a variety of ways of hitting highly conserved regions.
Nothing at all about that approach suggests using "smaller ab" to "penetrate deeper." It's true camelids produce single-domain antibodies which are much smaller than the multi-domain antibodies humans use, but that wasn't the goal of the study: on the contrary, using peptide linkers to string together ab sounds like it accomplishes quite the contrary.
I think the actual rationale is: "we wanted to string together a bunch of different antibodies to maximize the likelihood of our construction finding a target, and human ab are so big that if we string them together it'll be useless - so we strung together a bunch of small, highly targeted ab, whose final size will still be small enough to allow the multi-headed hydra to interact with viruses."
If the inside parts have more to do with the functioning of the virus (which is what one might guess from hearing that they are more conserved), could targeting them with antibodies bias viral evolution towards colds turning deadly as opposed to slight changes in their shell proteins?
Evolution often makes viruses less deadly, as it wants to maximize dispersion, and killing the host is usually not a good strategy. They will probably just try to mutate to cover those inner parts of the shell proteins.
I can't bring myself to be in any way happy from reading stuff like this. We get articles like this every freaking day and probably only a fraction of them will ever get into production.
In fairness, we produce monoclonal abs for new indications - and get them into production - constantly. It's one of the richest fields in pharma right now. And people have been having slow-moving but noticeable success with this sort of approach for flu for a few years now. We may get there.
And when we do, it won't be recognizably related to this article, because the pop-sci writer and his headline editor mangled the description so terribly that it bears only a passing resemblance to what the study actually did.
Not my field, but based on what I know of the quality of research in this lab and the fact that it was published in Science, I would be very surprised if the results aren't very solid and reproducible.
This fad is getting old, pharmacology has little trouble with reproducibility.
Few early-stage trials make it to market, but that's an entirely different matter. The treatment they developed, and published in a highly regarded journal, almost certainly works as described. That's a very different beast from a treatment that will be effective in humans to the high standards we hold modern drugs to.
> The treatment they developed, and published in a highly regarded journal, almost certainly works as described.
No, this is simply not true. Unless you also mean “cures the disease, but kills the patient for some other reason” and other net negative outcomes.
Most of those studies are on tissue samples, or rodent analogs. That’s not the same as live trials and there is no basis for claiming they’d work in situ.
The procedure was tested on live animals. I guarantee you that what they describe is precisely what happens. There's no guarantee that it prevents all types of flu, but that is not what the paper claims.
There's further no guarantee that the rat survives, or mates, or becomes emperor of China for that matter. What is reproducible is what is described in the paper, not what you might wish would follow.
Reproducibility is a very specific requirement. It requires that, following the procedure as outlined, you will find similar data. It has nothing to do with application, or utility, or anything else. It is simply that your results, for the same experiment, will be similar.
What I don't get is why are we are spending resources on artificially fortifying our bodies for something that's not event a serious threat? We as society already possess capabilities to survive against threats even more serious. Our body is magnificently apt at defending itself. Disease becomes a problem for us only when we are not taking good care of ourself and our environment, like all the disease outbreaks in UK and US in 1800-1900 when we were living in filthy environment of cities and consuming food/water contaminated by our own filth. Thanks to sanitization revolutions we were able to regain our health. We can once again reach pinnacle of our health if we get rid of newly create pollution in our environment/food.
100 years ago the 1918 flu killed 100,000,000 people. That seems like something worth preventing a second time if we can. All the sanitation in the world isn't going to counteract the fast global transportation network we (and disease) enjoy today.
Eh what? Even with modern healthy conditions the flu can be devestating to the very young or old / frail. The vaccination aproach is not just to keep yourself from getting sick, it’s also to prevent yourself from being a vector to infect people who might not be able to be vaccinated or survive if they were to become ill.
Some flu strains also appear to work either better or just as well on the healthier people, including the 1918 flu, because they can trigger a nasty autoimmune cascade, and at that point, your healthy immune system becomes a nasty liability.
Right, that I think I understand. However, maybe we could do better by eliminating micro-plastics from the food chain and having health guidance that isn’t written by big sugar, big fat, and big agro? Why do we have to inject new manufacturered drugs into the entire population? Where’s the limit with vaccines? Should all viruses and bacteria be eliminated through vaccine? I’ve never seen a drug without a side effect so while I am pro-vax for things like polio and even chickenpox, I really do wonder where the imperative is for flu. We can likely make much greater strides in general numbers by simply providing free access to mental health practitioners. Heck, I bet even returning the US House of Representatives to a 100,000 count per would have meaningful results on the public’s welfare, and that doesn’t require injections!
i believe the reason you are being down voted here is because we as a society can work on more then one thing at a time.
people working on flu vaccines are probably not interested, trained or able to work on public welfare. People who work on public welfare are not interested, trained or able to work on vaccines.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6414/598