
‘It’s something I have never seen’: How the Covid-19 virus hijacks cells - onemoresoop
https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/21/coronavirus-hijacks-cells-in-unique-ways/?
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AnonC
This was a bit dense in some paragraphs for me as a layperson, but the
conclusion sounded like we may have found a more reliable (read understood)
way to tackle this virus. Is that the case? (I realize a lot more work would
have to be done for effective drugs and vaccines)

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drwiggly
It talks about two processes that happen.

The first is cells emit a signal to other cells that it's infected, which
causes the cell receiving the signal to shutdown replication facilities.

The second message sends out a call for the cops.

Covd2 stops the first signal but allows the second.

Suppressing the first signal means it can replicate faster because the cells
in the area didn't stop their replication facilities.

Allowing the second means you get tons of cops showing up because every cell
is now calling the hotline. So many cops in one area causes problems of its
own.

The cops can't kill them fast enough because the cells aren't slowing down
replication. So you get tons of virus cells and tons of host immune cells, and
not enough organ cells doing whatever they do.

Anyway they're saying possibly manually taking replication inhibitors would
substitute for cells 1st message not working, and allow the runaway infection
to be killed by the cops.

There are issues with just blindly taking drugs for this. So they'd have to
find out when its appropriate.

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jonny_eh
There would likely be consequences to forcing your cells to stop replicating
for an extended period too.

~~~
pavs
doesn't chemotherapy does something similar to this:

"The ability of chemotherapy to kill cancer cells depends on its ability to
halt cell division. Usually, cancer drugs work by damaging the RNA or DNA that
tells the cell how to copy itself in division. If the cancer cells are unable
to divide, they die."

So wouldn't a low dose chemotherapy work on this drug?

~~~
vikramkr
It might, though the viral replication factories aren't necessarily the ones
that are used for cells to replicate. If they do work, well, you'd have all
those side effects of stopping cell replication that the parent mentioned -
all those horrible side effects of chemo. Maybe it would be worth it, but it
would have to be pretty darn effective to be worth those side effects.

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blackrock
I wonder how novel the attack vector of Covid-19 is, in comparison to other
viruses.

HIV slowly kills you, by infecting your blood. But it requires blood contact.

Ebola quickly kills you by liquefying your internal organs, and you die in a
hemorrhagic fever. It requires fluidic contact, or maybe via droplets too.

SARS-1 was transmitted via airborne and aerosols.

Covid-19 is airborne, even though they keep saying it’s via droplets.

So, the transmission is very contagious by being airborne. And it hides itself
better, meaning not everyone infected will show symptoms, so there can easily
be silent spreaders. And for those infected, it won’t show up for a few days,
and you can transmit it without know you’re actually infected.

Then, it kills you by slowly wearing you down, until your other organs fail,
and you technically die of organ failure.

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cpdean
the surname of the researcher, tenOever, seemed really odd to me, but I found
an interview he did a few years back and looks like he's a real person.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WCXuaLXHP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WCXuaLXHP4)

~~~
elric
The capitalization is a bit odd, but it's not an uncommon Dutch surname.
Usually spelled in two words: "Ten Oever". That would probably be "Banks" in
English, as in a river bank.

While I'm on the subject, the Dutch (as in the nationality, not the language)
are a bit unusual when it comes to surnames. It's common to capitalize every
word in a name in many parts of the world, but the Dutch usually don't
capitalize words like "ten" or "van" ("from", "of"), which can make for
weirdly capitalized names like "Jan ten Oever". Were the same person to live
in Belgium, the same Dutch name would become "Jan Ten Oever".

~~~
wiml
My favorite example of this is the famous physicist Gerard 't Hooft. His last
name (by which I mean, the way you would refer to him in a formal situation
like a citation) is "'t Hooft" — yes, that starts with an apostrophe and a
lower-case T.

However, like many names which have a prefix, it is properly alphabetized
under "H", not "t" or "'". This is an example of why linguistic tagging is
often necessary, not just nice-to-have. A Dutch author "van Dijk" should be
sorted under D, but an American (or, perhaps, Belgian) author "Van Dyke"
should be sorted under V. The same is traditionally true of Scottish names
starting with Mc/Mac, as I understand it. The rigid FIRSTNAME LASTNAME model
of human names breaks down in very, very many places.

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anitil
I have a question that I hope someone in medical research might be able to
guide me to understanding.

Suppose we had a 'good enough' vaccine today. It's side effects are rare
enough and/or minor enough that it can be used on the general population, and
it is effective in enough people to be worth using. However we don't yet know
both of these things.

What would be the likely timeline from lab, to small feasibility trials to
safety trials to population trials to large-scale distribution?

My guess based on the risk of distributing a vaccine that could have long-term
risks down the line and the large population that would be taking it is that
this could be multiple years of slowly increasing the population using it. Is
this correct?

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SpicyLemonZest
Vaccines in general are believed not to have long-term risks beyond those
caused by the desired immune response - there's just not really a plausible
mechanism that would allow them to. If it's proven to be effective and safe
over O(months), scaling up distribution will be the only blocker.

(And note that this isn't quite a "suppose"; we have a lot of vaccine
candidates today, and most experts expect some of them will prove to be good
enough.)

~~~
anitil
Thanks, I didn't know either of these things.

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_bxg1
It's so exciting to see science begin to gain such a deep understanding of the
mechanisms at play. I'm hopeful we'll get an effective treatment long before
the vaccine is available.

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moonbug
quote all virologists about every virus studied.

