Scientists at Stanford have a new approach to battling viral outbreaks, such as Zika. The group is using a drug to boost the human body’s ability to resist the virus rather than taking on the virus directly.
Graduate student Richard Deans started testing the newly developed drug on human cells and found that it enabled the cells to fight off viruses that normally kill them. Unfortunately, the drug also caused the cells to stop dividing.
In order to improve the drug, Deans turned to to Michael Bassik, assistant professor of genetics. Bassik screened the cells and found that the drug was interfering with a protein crucial for making individual building blocks of RNA. Without RNA the virus can’t make more of itself, which explains why the drug was so effective. However, the same building blocks needed for RNA synthesis are also needed to make DNA. When a cell runs out of DNA building blocks, it can no longer divide.
Kalocin is real!
Seeing current events as they are is wrecking me emotionally. So I say 'farewell' to this forum. For anyone who wonders.
... The side effect is that affected cells (read: all cells, probably) stop dividing and you die in a week or so when your lungs give out. There's quite a way to go before this would be even slightly safe for use in humans.
“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Esquire wrote:... The side effect is that affected cells (read: all cells, probably) stop dividing and you die in a week or so when your lungs give out. There's quite a way to go before this would be even slightly safe for use in humans.
Fictional drug from Michael Crichton's book The Andromeda Strain. Wikipedia description:
A universal wonder drug stumbled upon by Jensen Pharmaceuticals, but to whose research and development Dr. Jeremy Stone was the first to object. Kalocin is effective against every known virus, bacterium, fungus, and parasite, and even cancer. Research on Kalocin was halted and knowledge of it was covered up after it was discovered that anyone who stopped taking the drug quickly died from bizarre and massive infections "no one had ever seen before". This was because the clearing away of normal microbes left tissues vulnerable to attack from other, rare ones that ordinarily could not become established. This, as Stone had been the first to perceive, was a case of superinfection, a possible side effect of many antibiotics and/or antivirals.
Seeing current events as they are is wrecking me emotionally. So I say 'farewell' to this forum. For anyone who wonders.
Bassik screened the cells and found that the drug was interfering with a protein crucial for making individual building blocks of RNA. Without RNA the virus can’t make more of itself, which explains why the drug was so effective. However, the same building blocks needed for RNA synthesis are also needed to make DNA. When a cell runs out of DNA building blocks, it can no longer divide.
In the words of XKCD:
This drug might put the ebola and your cells on an equal footing, but only in the sense that both are equally doomed.
