
From MIT, a cure for all viruses? - MRonney
http://www.process.org/discept/2011/11/17/draco-death-to-the-virus/
======
robomartin
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.

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

~~~
jrnkntl
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>

------
lell
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.

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

This was directly addressed in the linked article.

~~~
firefoxman1
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?

~~~
mokus
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 ;)

~~~
firefoxman1
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.

------
adamgravitis
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.

------
silentscope
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.

------
tokenadult
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.

~~~
seanp2k2
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.

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

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

~~~
ktizo
Are you sure about that?

------
smogzer
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.

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

~~~
gwillen
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.

------
etrain
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.

------
huxley
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

~~~
tomjen3
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.

------
roadnottaken
Link to the original research [PDF]:

<http://goo.gl/jfAIw>

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

~~~
saulrh
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.

~~~
streptomycin
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.

------
secoif
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.

~~~
refurb
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.

------
xanadohnt
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.

~~~
efuquen
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.

~~~
xanadohnt
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...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/404/enemy-camp-2010) Listen to the part about hook worms.

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

~~~
syntaxide
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.

~~~
ori_b
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.

~~~
api
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.

------
mmj48
Side note: have mercy on your readers and make the text contrast a bit higher.

------
jballanc
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.

~~~
minikomi
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.

~~~
irollboozers
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.

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

~~~
irollboozers
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.

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

------
minikomi
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.

------
rickyconnolly
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.

~~~
Tossrock
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.

------
praxeologist
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)

------
caycep
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?

~~~
ohashi
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).

~~~
vajrabum
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.

~~~
ohashi
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)

------
trebor
But do we _need_ to cure all viruses? Do we know that all are hostile to
humans?

~~~
Symmetry
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.

------
sambeau
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).

------
DRACOMALFOA
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.

;-)

~~~
uncoder0
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...](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/11/iceman-autopsy/hall-
text)

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

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

~~~
uncoder0
Pre-coffee comment. Thanks for the proof read.

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

------
devy
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!

~~~
tomjen3
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.

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

------
Allaun
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.

~~~
Symmetry
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.

