The new trick is that they are able to discover the structure of molecule they need through computer simulations modeling immune system/virus.
Basically it uses Recombinant DNA technology to mass produce this. It's already being used to produce growth hormone of various kids for use in humans, swines and bovines.
Difference here is that tho, in growth hormone we know the structure of peptide already as it can be extracted from the pituitary of the cadaver
What happens if the virus mutates during the development of the cure? Isn't that the real nature of viruses and the reason why we can't really cure the common cold/flu?
Coronaviruses have historically been quite stable (not an expert on this but I read this recently). More stable than the Influenza viruses at least. So we can only hope..
Coming at it from a different and lay angle, could a cure be devised that would be even more contageous, spreading around fast and eliminating the virus?
hi I'm an idiot who knows nothing. can someone please explain the disconnect between this sentence:
> “It’s all of us against the bug,” said Neil King of the University of Washington, who has been part of the hunt for a coronavirus vaccine since 2017.
The former sentence seems to suggest there is as yet no path towards a vaccine for this particular virus in that researchers have been trying without success for three years, or is this having to do with the distinction between an immediate vaccine vs. one that is more generalized?
The coronavirus is also responsible for SARS and MERS. They had good luck with a vaccine for SARS but it wasn’t needed anymore so they stopped. MERS is highly lethal and was something they wanted a vaccine for if it popped back up. Ideally (this is where my knowledge stops) the vaccines they were working on for other strains will be a good launching pad to make a vaccine for COVID-19.
AFAIK the closest they got to working vaccines for SARS and MERS cause lung damage from autoimmune response in each tested animal model.
The issue with these viruses is that they have a property known as Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE). Where normally neutralizing antibodies instead facilitate entry into your cells.
Early versions were causing even more extreme cytokine storms than the SARS virus did without the vaccine.
This shit is trial and error with some difficult to handle results when things are still in development. Which is why the idea that we'll have a safe and effective vaccine within the year is a complete pipe dream.
Current processes for vaccine development take years.
If you're happy to have a significant chance of infecting the target with the thing you're trying to protect them from, you can make one in an afternoon with 18th century tech.
Considering that a major disease outbreak could kill millions, I think we should reconsider this approach. Thousands of people might die to perfect the vaccine making process, but thats better than millions dying from the disease.
a reporter once asked me to write a bunch of programming buzzwords on a whiteboard for part of a transmission, you sure this isn't the bioversion of that?
`dsign` refers to the one with President Trump, not the laptop displaying the protein.
Caption is "President Trump is shown a vaccine model during a tour of the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, Md., on March 3. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES"
fair enough, but why would that be worth a million? Even using the phrase in a jocular fashion - it's not that interesting of a photo.
Being pedantic if I look at his photos on Getty Images and choose something about the same quality (I didn't find the exact image) and selecting for both web and print newspaper editorial front page I'm thinking about $4000
Is it actually a million on Getty Images? Or is it worth a million as in the common vernacular usage because it is amusing or has some worthwhile quality I cannot discern?
Its a screen displaying a protein. One approach to the vaccine is by looking at it as a protein folding problem. They're trying to find a protein that can bind to the 'spike' of the corona-virus and prevent it from attaching to our cells.
To be pedantic, that would not be a vaccine, that would be an anti-viral drug. What they were doing here is expressing parts of the actual corona virus antigens on a "baseplate" that could contain many copies of it, in the hope that the human immune system would catch up on it if presented to the body and the resulting antibodies would possibly be effective against the coronavirus.
Regarding antiviral drugs for this, the corona-virus entry mechanism was elucidated and candidate inhibitors for this were located in previous articles during the last week ( https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30229-4 )
The virus originated in Wuhan. This is no more inappropriate than calling the 1918 pandemic the "Spanish Flu". Ironically more so because the Spanish flu is thought to be a misnomer because Spain was simply the first place to report the flu in the news.
>deliberately implies a link to specific area and people, which is countereffective
No, what's counter-effective right now is social policing according to bleeding heart policies. Now is not the time to clutch at pearls and treat everyone "equally." Example: weeks ago Chinese Nationality and especially travel from Wuhan was a statistically strong prior for virus contact, and therefore the "xenophobic" travel bans were justified.
Sometimes natural disasters are politically incorrect. Your response must match else you risk putting other people at risk in the name of prudeness.
> No, what's counter-effective right now is social policing according to bleeding heart policies. Now is not the time to clutch at pearls and treat everyone "equally."
Everybody knows that Wuhan is where it came from, and that it's been the hardest hit. My understanding is that what they're concerned about is long-lasting associations. 100 years later we're still calling the 1918 thing the "Spanish Flu"; I'd be willing to bet tourism to Spain dropped significantly in the decade that followed that epidemic.
Could you name the place where SARS originated? I can't; and even if I could it wouldn't be a strong correlation in my mind. That's what we want 10 years from now -- for people planning travel itineraries to associate Wuhan with a the actual city and surroundings, not with a disaster that happened a decade in the past.
This isn't "bleeding heart policies"; it's just simple Golden-rule consideration, based on a century of experience.
People are not going to forget this came from Wuhan whether you call it the Wuhan Flu or not.
I understand that the intentions are benevolent, but policing language does not change reality. No more than stigmatizing the word "retard" (originally a scientific term like moron, imbecile, idiot, and all the rest) will change people's responses to those with mental disabilities.
The downside to this kind of stigmatization is that people start to abuse it as soft cultural power, which breeds resentment and discord among the population. I'd be willing to guess it's literally one of the peculiar Western cultural features those "evil Russian hackers" (and other nation states) are targeting to wedge society apart.
> The downside to this kind of stigmatization is that people start to abuse it as soft cultural power
Humans have been enforcing social norms for at least as long as we have written history. And people have probably been abusing that habit for just as long.
Some social norms are good; others are bad. Some ways of enforcing social norms are polite, others are annoying, others (Twitter mobs) can be horrifying.
I would consider "Let's call this the coronavirus, or CORVID-19, out of consideration for Wuhan 10 years from now" as at least a reasonable one; and a polite request on Hackernews is hardly going to give you PTSD or ruin your life.
In other words: I understand where you're coming from, but "My right to call this the Wuhan virus" is a funny hill to choose to die on. :-)
Because it's not "the coronavirus" any more than the Spanish Flu is "the flu". The Spanish Flu was one pandemic that happened with one strain of the flu; it's not the same flu that we get every year. Similarly, COVID-19 or whatever we end up calling it in the future is not "the coronavirus", because that term applies to MANY different viruses, including MERS and SARS.
Yes, exactly, it's no more inappropriate than calling it the spanish flu, which health authorities consider innapropriate. It didn't originate in Spain but a hundred years later we still link it with Spain. The whole point is that future pandemics should not be given names that are tied to a name or a person so that we can explicitly avoid another case like the Spanish flu where we name it after a place hundreds of years later. The better name for the Spanish flu is the 1918 flu pandemic.
This is politics, not medicine. The opinions of medical personnel are irrelevant. Moreover I'm not sure why you'd continue to trust these "official" medical sources when they've shown (CDC and WHO) to be incompetent and possibly corrupt.
>It didn't originate in Spain but a hundred years later we still link it with Spain
And it has no bearing on tourism to Spain or the treatment of Spanish people. So the policing is clearly unnecessary.
Basically it uses Recombinant DNA technology to mass produce this. It's already being used to produce growth hormone of various kids for use in humans, swines and bovines.
Difference here is that tho, in growth hormone we know the structure of peptide already as it can be extracted from the pituitary of the cadaver