New Ebola Drug 100% Effective In Monkeys 129
TrisexualPuppy writes "A team of scientists at Boston University has created a cure for the Ebola virus, first discovered in 1976. After setting the correct dosages, all monkeys tested with the vaccine survived with only mild effects. No tests have been performed on humans yet, as outbreaks happen infrequently and are difficult to track. Quoting NPR: '[The drug] contains snippets of RNA derived from three of the virus's seven genes. That "payload" is packaged in protective packets of nucleic acid and fat molecules. These little stealth missiles attach to the Ebola virus's replication machinery, "silencing" the genes from which they were derived. That prevents the virus from making more viruses.'"
Re:first post? (Score:1, Informative)
"It seems simple enough to figure out the RNA sequence of a virus,"
I don't think it was 30 years ago.
Re:first post? (Score:1, Informative)
Because it only affect africans. Nobody dies in the US from it, so it's not really popular with research grants donators.
Re:Time for the SuperEbola? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This brings to mind... (Score:5, Informative)
Morever, all viruses do not start with an RNA-based genome. Some DNA based viruses use promoters for their genes that cause very strong expression of the genes, like the CMV promoter [PDF alert] [wjgnet.com], which is used in isolation to create "over expression" in molecular biology. RNAi is typically very poor against such strong promoters.
Ebola is a virus that is relatively slow replicating in the initial stages. It is not a particularly ingenious design as compared to say the flu virus. This gives the RNAi a chance to work against it.
In short, I don't want to say _never_ (that'll just be ignorant), but as yet, RNAi needs a lot of research and is perhaps not the best strategy for all viruses.
Re:first post? (Score:1, Informative)
I wonder how many lives will eventually be saved and what awards will be gotten because of this.
That's fantastic. Now they'll be able to starve to death instead.
Re:100% effective in FIVE monkeys (Score:1, Informative)
I refer everyone to XKCD and Extrapolation.
http://xkcd.com/605/
It saves time and protects folks that have insufficient education to see the sarcasm tags inherent in your comment.
Re:first post? (Score:3, Informative)
This is also an issue for people who can pay for a drug, even United States citizens who have health insurance. There have been recent news articles highlighting the fact that the United States is facing a shortage of various anti-venoms [popularmechanics.com] because corporations are either stopping production or never bothered to develop a manufacturing process because there is no significant profit potential.
This is an excellent idea but I would even go so far as to suggest taking out the "leads to effective cures" requirement as it can take a long time to reap the benefits and corporations would be more likely to utilize the offer if it provided an immediate tax benefit.
The recent move by GlaxoSmithKline [slashdot.org] that we all read about is a good example of a case where a corporation should be given a tax break.
However, tax breaks are far from enough. The only reason GSK was even researching a malaria vaccine was because of the huge profit potential from millions of infections globally. There are numerous ailments that will never receive corporate financing because there is no profit motive. Note the scorpion anti-venom case in the previously mentioned article where all the anti-venom is produced non-profit by a university professor and no corporation is willing to step up to create and sell a product.
Ultimately there are a vast number of medical and non-medical ventures that should be funded by the public because they do not present any significant profit potential to entice corporations but society would gain both tangible and intangible benefits.
Sadly the direction the United States appears to be headed is to a purist position of worship and submission to the almighty corporation, gross margins and a "greed is good" mentality. This can be seen in reading some of the articles on the anti-venom issue [red-alerts.com] that suggest a solution is tort reform and easing of FDA regulations. Of course these arguments are a misnomer as these proponents admit themselves that the issue is a lack of profit potential and the suggested tort reform and easing of regulations are likely a one time benefit on the Internal Rate of Return calculation used to determine if a project is financially viable. The end result would still be no cures or research for low or no profit situations with the addition of federal protection for corporations against law suits from the public and elimination of regulations that are in place to help prevent the conditions that result in law suits in the first place.
Re:100% effective in FIVE monkeys (Score:3, Informative)
Re:100% effective in FIVE monkeys (Score:5, Informative)
The p-value is 0.00032 by my off-the-cuff calculation (pbinom(0, 5, 0.8) in R.) So yeah, it's pretty significant. That being said, sample sizes this small still do tend to make people nervous -- the p-value is calculated assuming that the monkeys in question represent a good sample of the population, and doesn't account for lab-specific or family-specific effects. (Where were the monkeys bred? How closely are they related? What sub-population do they belong to? Etc.) So we can certainly accept the finding for what it is, but regulatory bodies will, with good reason, want to see larger animal trials before approving even limited human use.
Re:first post? (Score:5, Informative)
'She said that little was said at that point about exactly how they procured this method, but it is something possible only with new technologies that have evolved in the past decade.'
Yes, their method clearly depends on RNAi (RNA interference), for which the key paper only came out in 1998, and the Nobel Committee obviously didn't regard the discovery as 'simple enough'!:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2006/adv.html [nobelprize.org]
It wasn't until 2001 that RNAi was demonstrated in mammalian cells, so its use as a standard tool in molecular biology only dates back to the last decade. To apply this sort of strategy to Ebola also requires knowledge of its genome sequence, which also wasn't complete until the 90s, as well as an effective method of getting the active molecules into infected cells (like the lipid-based packaging approach used here). There is indeed active research aimed at applying RNAi to other viruses, including HIV, but it's far from straightforward.