Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

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Ah, precisely, the lab is not the human body. The fact that you can kill HIV with X in the lab is meaningless. Bleach does a quite adequate job of that. However, we care about in vivo efficacy, and that's qualitatively a different problem. For every thousand drugs that seem promising in isolation in a petri dish (e.g. killing cancer cells and not damaging human tissue) perhaps only a handful make it to human trials, and then not all of those prove effective (or completely safe).

If every new substance that killed HIV or cancer in the lab made the news then you would not have time to read about anything else, there are more than you could imagine. Substances at the "kills X in the lab" stage are generally only of concern to researchers, because the chances that they'll turn into a "cure" are extremely low.

Buying a lottery ticket isn't news. Winning the lottery is. This sort of thing is the former, not the latter.

I am sorry, perhaps you are allergic to monkeys, but I did mention them, and I did mention that bleach was not tried on monkeys and succeeded. Monkeys that is, not labs.

Agreed. This protein DOES exist in the body, DOES destroy viruses, and now protects monkeys. That does sound significant.

"(The research was done on cell cultures; no rhesus monkeys were used in the study.)"

This is a protein that monkeys produce naturally, humans too, except HIV has evolved a resistance to the human version. There has been no research involving giving any animal this protein (even monkeys) and seeing results.

This doesn't represent any great progress toward a "cure". You can't administer proteins orally because they will be broken down by the immune system. If people start injecting monkey proteins into their bloodstream their immune systems are pretty likely to freak out, so they'd have to go on immuno-suppressive therapy, which rather defeats the point and may be far too dangerous to attempt with HIV in play. As likely as not, if this research is to come to anything (sans magical ultimate control over human genetics and immune reaction) it'll come from development of a drug that mimics the active site of this protein.

In short, we have not the slightest clue today whether this track of research will produce results in the form of effective treatments for HIV infection or whether it will come to nothing.

Minor correction: I meant to say "broken down by the digestive system" with regards to administering proteins orally.

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