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.'"
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"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:5, Insightful)
I don't think it was 30 years ago.
Exactly. I talked with one of my contacts at the Atlanta CDC about this. 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. That, and the limited amount of manpower dedicated to such a project mean that unless you're really lucky, it's going to take the full 30 years.
I wonder how many lives will eventually be saved and what awards will be gotten because of this.
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Except that 2 weeks is not long to spread. AIDS kills so many because it takes so long to get to work.
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I can't imagine the fallout that would occur if an ebola victim went to a major international airport. It'd be horrific, and even if, as in previous cases, the ebola virus "burned out" fast, it could be an international crisis.
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There, you're realistically describing an airborne version of such a virus, not an STD, and probably not even the multiple bodily fluids borne version that is the baseline Ebola virus. An STD is really a disease that spreads so poorly only direct membrane to bodily fluid contact tends to spread it. STDs typically won't spread dry skin to dry skin, or by fluids if those are exposed to sunlight or cold for even a few minutes, and they die very, very quickly if exposed to many common environmental stressors ot
Pool's closed. (Score:3, Funny)
they die very, very quickly if exposed to many common environmental stressors other germs resist, for example, pool Chlorine
Then explain why, at the hotel near me, the pool was closed due to AIDS.
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One could only imagine an ebola like venereal disease. AIDS with a 90% death rate and a two week period from infection to death.
That sounds frightening- and I'm sure it would be if you actually caught it- but it would quite likely be self-limiting since people would probably die before they were likely to spread it to many- if any- other partners (two week max. window, reduced by period they were visibly ill during), and the trail of infected people would be clear- unlike "normal" AIDS where the delay of symptoms over years could make that *much* less obvious.
It's been said that ebola's aggressiveness in killing people quickly an
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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.
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Further to your point, this treatment is heavily dependent on PCR (polymerase chain reaction) techniques, which are very much a stock-in-trade tool of molecular biology now, but has only been technically possible since (IIRC) 1976 when the DNA polymerase from Thermophilus aquaticus was first isolated. The components required for the reactions were available by about 1980, and I think the first automatic machines became available in about '83 or '84.
They were, of course
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.
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I wonder how many lives will eventually be saved and what awards will be gotten because of this.
You're quite an optimist. My first thought was: Great... I wonder how long it will take the US military to start sticking ebola zaire into missiles. :-/
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Because it only affect africans. Nobody dies in the US from it, so it's not really popular with research grants donators.
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It might be worthwhile to give drug companies a tax break for donating information that leads to effective cures for less profitable conditions... I'm sure there are many substances that have
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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 bother
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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.
While I agree that this would greatly increase the incentive, I think that companies would then donate floods of information that they knew or suspected would in the end prove unproductive... because they reap an immediate benefit and that looks good on the quarterlies... If I have a dog, I expect it to act true to it's nature (i.e. "like a dog"). You can pretty much count on corporations to behave in a corporate manner. Maybe a structured schedule of small breaks for information and later "bonus" benefits
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That raises a question: should cures for illnesses with nearly 100% kill ratio be held to the same standards as cures for illnesses that are unlikely to kill you? After all, if the drug is guaranteed to kill the virus, then as long as it's less likely to kill you than the virus is it's in your best interests to take it. In the case of Ebola, drugs with mortality rates less 50%
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Seriously though why wasnt this thought of this before?
Thought of? Sure, it's probably been thought of many times by people in the field. But having the technical ability to make it happen for real, that's new. There's several parts to that too, such as the ability to analyze the virus at that level (not been around very long, expensive but not as costly as it used to be), the ability to figure out what bits to interfere with where the virus will find it difficult to mutate and yet which won't harm the host (hard!) and the ability to manufacture and deliver th
Remember (Score:5, Funny)
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Ebola [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, but the ones that fail animal trials don't make it to human trials. Also, this particular drug targets the disease itself, as opposed to anything in the host; it's not a cancer treatment or anything like that. There is a respectable chance that it could work successfully in human beings. Even if it does not, it is one hundred percent successful. Completely and utterly successful. Whether it works in humans or not it'll open up new avenues of research.
Human testing (Score:1)
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That is stupid. No animal is worth more than another animal, humans included.
You want to solve a human problem? Use humans.
Wow... Someone needs to be taken for a walk
critter testing is "cheaper" (Score:2)
You off a Howler monkey during a test you just need to do your report (necropsy ect) and get another monkey
Off a human during a test and you have
1 a much larger report
2 a very detailed autopsy
3 a report to Legal to make sure your "assets" are covered
4 a possible lawsuit from the next of kin
5 it gets a bit harder to get more humans when you have a track record of offing your volunteers
Re:Time for the SuperEbola? (Score:4, Informative)
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HIV adapts to antivirals.
Fortunately it is not especially transmissible and most people that are undergoing treatment are at least somewhat responsible about not exposing others.
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OK, you've just said something that is nearly 100% true, but has almost no meaning outside of the context you've left out. RNA mutates just as DNA does, and is subject to selection in theory. So, an RNA based virus can evolve. But, there are important differences.
1. Just about every gene in a virus is vital, as that same evolutionary pressure selects to weed out all the junk code at a much higher rate. The penalties a virus pays for hauling any gene not vitally needed are so big, it ha
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That said, if we manage to keep people from dying but not keep them from spreading the virus then that would be bad. Obviously, to get these antivirals, you're already in the quarantine. Unlike
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Expect a statement from renowned scientists and vaccine experts Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carey soon.
This brings to mind... (Score:4, Interesting)
...wouldn't this be a great generic treatment for all infections by viruses?
If not, I'd like to know the reason.
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It sounds similar to Phage Therapy [wikipedia.org], long story short you have to identify and isolate the virus in question before you can treat it, because there are so many variants of most viruses you need tons of phages to treat what we the masses think of as a single virus. If Ebola doesn't change too much, or if they found critical parts of Ebola that never change between variants, it might be possible to attack those, but targeted approaches don't work against disparate viruses.
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It sounds similar to Phage Therapy [wikipedia.org], long story short you have to identify and isolate the virus in question before you can treat it, because there are so many variants of most viruses you need tons of phages to treat what we the masses think of as a single virus. If Ebola doesn't change too much, or if they found critical parts of Ebola that never change between variants, it might be possible to attack those, but targeted approaches don't work against disparate viruses.
What if one day we'll be able to synthesize a therapy while the patient is waiting in the waiting room? Just consider the leaps in DNA sequencing. Once a tedious manual process where we were lucky to decipher a few dozen nucleotides in a row, now a technology with the prospect of sequencing a person's whole DNA for a few dozen bucks. (I admit that I'm not aware of the precise state of the art today.) A century from now - if our civilization won't collapse in the meantime - we might be able to synthesize a v
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Sequencing a virus ought to cost dramatically less, but first you have to identify the culprit. So while antibiotics and antivirals are only effective some of the time, any asshole can cycle through 'em until they find something that works, without having to know what illness is responsible... most of the time. Phage therapy requires that every doctor be highly skilled, which would be nice.
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The problem is the wide variation in viruses even within a single host. Even if you can synthesize a therapy against the most common form in a host, those that are not suppressed will take dominance (as with any drug resistance). The ideal solution, and what will hopefully happen in the future, is the ability to initiate therapy with multiple target drugs to effectively corner the virus out of viability -
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.
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Viruses that integrate into the genome of host cells would likely not be removed by this mechanism. It may be possible to inhibit the virus enough to prevent spread between cells, but persistence down cell lineages may mean lifetime treatment is required. That said, if we can suppress replication enough to prevent onward transmission eradication would be the result.
100% effective in FIVE monkeys (Score:4, Insightful)
Ebola's death rate is so high that this treatment would have to be extremely dangerous to keep it form being used. Death rates are in the 80-90% range now, so if it dropped them to even just 50% it's worth a large risk.
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Five monkey more than you've cured.
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Ebola has 90% mortality rate, if 5 monkeys survived without much hiccup then we can be very confident the stuff is working.
the lead scientist guy:
http://www.bumc.bu.edu/microbiology/research-and-research-themes/faculty-and-their-research/thomas-w-geisbert/
looks like this year's Nobel entrant.
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Um, do the maths. 100% effective in five monkeys scales out to 100% effective in 5 million monkeys in my arithmetic book. But then again my books are published in Texas....
This is a standard EE/CS/engineering view where everything is deterministic, or very nearly so.
As an EE-turned-biologist, one of the big things I had to get my head around is that like it or not, Biology is messy. Very messy. Whereas in Engineering, models that are accurate to 1% are considered adequate, and 0.1% good, in Biology, models that are accurate to merely 50% are considered good, and above that is excellent. Biology is messy. There are many, many, many uncontrolled variables, most of which are
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I want to point out that he was being sarcastic, since I'm not sure if you picked up on that or not.
The hint was the bit about Texas, which is well known for throwing around bunk science to push religious or political views.
He basically said the same thing you did, just in a lot less space.
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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:100% effective in FIVE monkeys (Score:5, Insightful)
A mortality rate of 80% of out 5 monkeys, 4 would have died. If 0 died in the vaccine group, it is a pretty significant finding.
Maybe someone here can be bothered to draw up the exact significance, but I'm pretty sure it will be a percentage surprisingly high for a sample of 5 individuals, since the mortality is so high to begin with.
For example with rabies, the mortality rate is a solid 100%. Managing to save even 1 infected individual is nothing short of a monumental achievement, as in all recorded history, we only have 3 survivors total, with Jeanna Giese being the first and the 2 others with the course derived from her treatment. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_protocol [wikipedia.org] - so these 3 survivor make up a pretty high significance when compared to 0 before.
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.
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Thanks for the calculation, you are of course right with the small population that is quite possible not really representative for all genotypes. Nonetheless, it's quite good against a deadly virus like this.
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With all due respect, fuck *that* and fuck *them*. The mortality rate of Ebola is very high and it is very fast acting. Minutes could literally make a difference in treatment.
Considering the circumstances of finding somebody infected with Ebola and having a reasonable window for treatment I simply can't imagine a situation in which testing anything experimental was not the right thing to
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I partially agree with you; I was a medic long I was a biostatistician, and in situations where the alternative to treatment -- any treatment -- is death, it's hard to argue for holding back.
The thing is, what you say about the speed with which Ebola acts is exactly right, and it's a big part of the problem with any treatment for it. Are we supposed to manufacture large stocks of the medication, distribute it to areas where Ebola is prevalent, and take whatever measures are necessary to store it and train
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You are right, they still need to test it on humans - and the death rates really make the "cure" thing seem unimportant.
But five monkeys aren't that few if you consider it was 30000 times the lethal dosage. Sounds to me like testing bomb-squad armor by dropping an atomic bomb on it - five times.
I doubt that we'll see this being treated as the breakthrough that it is without calling it something that it isn't yet.
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Before you start declaring a CURE!!! look at the number of test subjects. Preventing death in five monkeys is not exactly a cure.
It was for those 5 monkeys. Yes it does not mean it would be 100% effective in 20,000 monkeys or 1 human but it's a hell of a start. But you're right about the story summary being sensationalist. What do you expect here though?
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100 Percent Effective
Tsu Dho Nimh, your right! I was twitching as soon as I read that...give me a confidence interval instead, and maybe we will all sleep a little bit better at night!
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Could this RNA technique be applied to the HIV virii family as well
The Romans had no plural for virus. Therefore, the English plural is viruses . For more mistakes with latin not to make, see http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2139/what-is-the-plural-of-penis [straightdope.com].
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We already have a cure for AIDS. They're called condoms.
Oh wow, for real? What do you do with a condom to cure someone with AIDS?
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News, for Monkeys . . . (Score:3, Funny)
. . . and now, on BBC, "News for Parrots"
"No parrots were injured in Ebola tests . . ."
Can the same technique be used to (Score:2)
derive cures for other viruses?
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Continue to collaborate to folding@home, it does help.
Yeah but did they patent the process? (Score:2)
PETA (Score:2)
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Huh (Score:2)
Actually, this is more of a cure and definitely a form of genetic therapy (although the genetic material isn't incorporated into the patient's genome). The scientists used RNAi in which sequences of RNA complementary to the viral RNA are injected into the patient. When the complementary sequences bind together, they activate innate cellular defenses [wikipedia.org] against double stranded RNA which destroy the genetic material, thus preventing the virus from replicating within the cell. If
Question or 2 who's answers I'd like to know (Score:2)
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Of course, in the real world, people infected with Ebola might not get the drug within 30 minutes of infection like these monkeys did. So Geisbert is planning another set of experiments. "Can we go 24 hours or 48 hours or 72 hours before we start treatment?" he wondered. "Can we increase the window and still achieve 100 percent protection?"
Personally, I find this fascinating and I'd be interested to see the results of their next experiments as well.
With one small side effect... (Score:2)
When administered, it kills the monkey instantly.
Mutation (Score:2)
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The same unmutated strain could keep on killing say 80% of humans who are exposed, so there is no pressure to mutate from there. Whether it mutates fast or not thus would depend more on the main carriers.
Volunteers Needed for Double-Blind Human Trial (Score:2)
how many monkeys (Score:3, Funny)
how many monkeys did they test? 12?
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[H]ow many monkeys did they test? 12?
Science ain't an exact science with these clowns...
Correction: 99.999999% (Score:2)
It's only 100% effective until the first successful mutation of the virus allows it to survive.
Tested population = 6 monkeys (Score:2)
Tested population = 6 monkeys, but keep it in perspective.
Still a great accomplishment.
Lets not let this go like Anti-venom (Score:2)
Let's somehow keep this around, unlike coral snake anti-venom which is months away from being lost.
Conditional Probabilities (Score:2)
Speaking in terms of survival analysis:
The reported overall survival probability for an Ebola patient is supposedly 10%. But how many people/animals naturally have an immunity to Ebola, therefore they got infected but had no symptoms, therefore they never knew it? Then the marginal probability of surviving an Ebola infection may be greater than 10%.
Also, the survival probability changes over time depending on how long they were infected. An Ebola patient who has already survived, say, 5 days is more like
Not A Vaccine (Score:1)
The poster is wrong to refer to the drug as a "vaccine". A vaccine works by stimulating the body's immune system to develop antibodies against the disease. This drug works by attacking the disease directly.
sensationalism? (Score:1)
Side Effect... (Score:2)
An unfortunate side effect was it made the monkeys very very angry and aggressive. Monkeys infected with this "Rage" are not to be approached, and if you are bitten a level 9 quarantine should be immediately put into effect. Currently the monkeys are being held in a minimum security facility "Econo-Labs" which is located right next door to Peta National headquarters. We will try making the monkeys watch FOX news, mostly because we are a bunch of dicks...