261–267 of 267 posts
If (like me) you don't have a good working understanding of CRISPR, check out this fantastic episode of Radiolab: http://www.radiolab.org/story/antibodies-part-1-crispr/
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This is the type of innovation we exchange for a sense of absolute security in having highly-vetted decade-long bio R&D and extensive backlogs at the FDA for approvals to sell products on the market. It's go big or go home because the regulatory risk/timeline is so extensive. Most of these things die quietly or never get started so we never really see the true costs of what it takes to push the pharma world forward.…
No, this hasn't gotten anywhere near human testing yet. The FDA isn't involved.
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
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Didn't they already cure it? Magic Johnson had it, but now he doesn't. Or do you mean "cure it for non-basketball-millionaires"?
I think by cure they mean eradicate the virus, rather than suppress it. Most people can live relatively normal lives by keeping their viral load low, but this involves taking expensive medications every day for the rest of one's life. The drugs are things like protease inhibitors, modified DNA bases, etc. that muck up the virus' replication machinery so that it cannot make more copies. The goal of a lot of researcher…
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>There's a reason some ideas are left unexplored by industry. But your argument essentially boils down to "We haven't yet discovered an effective delivery method, therefore this technique will never work". Isn't that one of the basic problems facing all clinical genetic modification research? Is it unreasonable to assume that this problem could be solved by some future breakthrough, or does it somehow violate the law…
I fully support basic science pursuing crazy ideas. I think this is a very interesting piece of basic science, it's just at an incredibly speculative stage that's unsuitable for clinical investment. Efficient delivery of novel proteins into a cell by genetic methods, nanoparticles, or direct transduction is -the- challenge for a lot of novel ideas. Massive effort is ongoing to find breakthroughs here. The proteins in…
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I think ∼3E−5 per base per replication. Might be a more useful number [1]. If you use 10mers, that only gives you 1048576. I'd be almost certain that >90% of those sequences also exist in the human genome. So your target isn't specific enough (take out stuff you need as the parent suggested). So you need to use a longer sequence, perhaps 25bp. Maybe there's a stable region or set of regions you can target (in which c…
"Maybe there's a stable region or set of regions you can target (in which case the high overall mutation rate doesn't matter). Or a cocktail of sequences, specific to the global HIV population (I doubt this, HIV mutates more in a single individual than Flu does in the global population)." Hmm... I would bet that there is a cocktail of sequences such that if they are not conserved, the virus effectively becomes no lon…
There appears to be at least one conserved protein. However there's a lot of scope for different underlying sequences due to synonymous codons.
Depending on how long a fragment you need to target, that could end up being a lot of sequences, and unpractical.
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"Maybe there's a stable region or set of regions you can target (in which case the high overall mutation rate doesn't matter). Or a cocktail of sequences, specific to the global HIV population (I doubt this, HIV mutates more in a single individual than Flu does in the global population)." Hmm... I would bet that there is a cocktail of sequences such that if they are not conserved, the virus effectively becomes no lon…
I did a quick literature search, but couldn't find anything. It should be easy to answer that question. There appears to be at least one conserved protein. However there's a lot of scope for different underlying sequences due to synonymous codons. Depending on how long a fragment you need to target, that could end up being a lot of sequences, and unpractical.
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Only if we fail to educate people about the dangers of other STIs.
Which is happening... I would say the excessive mediatic exposure of HIV have definitely worked to supress awareness and care for other STIs. For instance, I am HPV+ and didn't have a clue about the existance of such a thing before getting it.