Ebola treatment: this is so inside the box it’s outside the box
Could an older technique yield an effective ebola treatment?
And will researchers take the suggestion and try to develop it, instead of a more conventional vaccine?:
The proposal builds on the use of “convalescent serum,” or survivors’ blood, which has been given to at least four U.S. Ebola patients who then recovered from the virus. It is based on an approach called passive immunization, which has been used since the 19th century to treat diseases such as diphtheria but has been largely surpassed by vaccination.
The scientists propose using new genetic and other technologies to find hundreds or thousands of different Ebola antibodies, determine their genetic recipe, grow them in commercial quantities and combine them into a single treatment analogous to the multi-drug cocktails that treat HIV-AIDS.
That contrasts with current drug development, which focuses on finding one molecule, or a small number, to defeat the Ebola virus that has killed nearly 5,000 people in West Africa and infected thousands more since March.
[NOTE: Among the three Nobel laureates joining in the call for passive immunization to treat ebola is James Watson, he of double-helix fame. I was stunned to learn that he is still around, and to discover that he’s only eighty-six, at that. I knew he’d been young when he and Crick had won the Prize for their discovery of the structure of DNA, but actually he was thirty-four, which isn’t so terribly young in science. Seems like so much time has passed that he should be about a hundred, though.
By the way, Watson and Crick had actually presented the structure in a paper published in 1953, when Watson would have been twenty-five. Young, but still not so terribly young in science, and his associates Crick and Wilkins were older, twelve years and twelve years respectively (associate Rosalind Franklin was eight years older, but she died before the Prize was awarded, so she was never considered for the honor).]
I own the ny times sunday section with watson and cricks announcement… was going to throw it out with other junk…
The first Nobel prize in medicine was awarded in 1901 to Emil von Behring who developed serum therapy to use against diptheria.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1901/behring-facts.html
There were problems later in using it for other diseases because they obviously did not have the techniques available today to identify, isolate, and purify the antibodies. There is still a lot of work to do on this.
BTW, last week the Emil von Behring prize was awarded to a friend of my husband, who works on antibiotic-resistant TB. I attended the ceremony and there was a seminar on vaccine development, and other aspects of the fight against TB. Even though I’m not a scientist, I learned a lot. Ebola came up quite a bit in the discussions.
I recommend reading The Double Helix for the Watson Crick story. It’s not that long and quite understandable.
twenty-five is very young in modern science… not historical science… but in modern science where you have to be approved to think by the politburo, you need to have your prek, kindergarten, grade school, junion high, high school, then your college and so on
so if you normally get out of high school at about 18
then its two to three for associates
four years bachelor’s degree
and two years to get a masters
then comes your phd…
hard to do that before your near 30…
my son couldnt finish that last step, he is the wrong sex and color for the politburo.. but not the wrong sex and color to die fighting for others.
There were problems later in using it for other diseases because they obviously did not have the techniques available today to identify, isolate, and purify the antibodies
in 1901, they did not even know about antibodies…
“Emil von Behring along with Kitasato Shibasaburo in 1890 who found the presence of a neutralizing substance in the blood that could counter infections”
but they did not know it was antibodies (though are credited anyway)
In 1900 Paul Ehrlich hypothesized that there are side chain receptors on cells that bind to a given pathogen. He speculated that this interaction induces the cell exhibiting the receptor to multiply and produce more copies of the same receptor. This theory, called the selective theory was not proven for next five decades.
Between 1901-1920, Landsteiner demonstrated the ABO blood group system (Rh antibody was found in in 1940). In the 1920s, Michael Heidelberger and Oswald Avery observed that antigens could be precipitated by antibodies and went on to show that antibodies were made of protein.
but the way we look at things now vs then has changed
but not enough. heck, i worked out a new structure for the blueprint model, because the model they use now does not follow a blue print.
simple things were in there, like the fact that a living organism is a pruned binary tree of cell division, and every pruned tree fits inside a perfect tree… so paring is a key process… then there is the migration of activation moving up and down this tree in time and locations… which gives its way to something i worked out called Benificience sorting.. which explains why and how we get new things, including organ genisis (cancer is the source of new organs), and on and on.
its really cool… worked with a geneticist, but took him a long time to ‘get it’ as they tend to accept things without examination, so they never really question that the idea of a blue print doesnt fit… nor have any really decent explanation that fits the whole of what they see or rather the whole from the part that they work on and see and how it fits into a whole no one really tries to work on
i then used it to solve the french flag problem
and also wrote a interesting paper on a data analsys of how codons expanded from two to threes, and why – which turned out to parallel the same conclusions developed by using extremophiles…
all kinds of wickedly cool things.
including a paper that solved the big data problem, and would allow one to go thorugh genetic data in minutes that now takes days…
but i was crushed, and not approved to think
now i just sit around waiting to die
as i have no advocacy and no sucesses
they have taken the IP, crushed some of the work
and mostly ignore the other stuff.
note that one of my best friends is top geneticist, i know Schadt of illumina, and my son was a geneticist as well… me? i am just a never been still hoping against hope.
i have incredible things, but cant share them
i am not approved to think
so anythig i produce doesnt count automatically
meanwhile, they are working on the UV bracelet that uses a few dollars in parts for porphyria patients (and blood pressure)
no one yet makes my blood brain catheter design, and i would lvoe to share tons of other things
but alas, aspergers puts me in a place alone
and alone is not a good place to share
Still looking for a partner/s that can make up for what i lack in terms of administration etc… though i decided to get back to trading to fund things and retire. so far i went from 13k to 71,000 in less than one year… i figure another year or two and i can self fund and or retire. i am good at trading – its pretty easy. as is tech and design… my aspergers makes it so… but people, contracts, partners, and so on… that has me requiring a partner… so far all my partners either diddled, or cleaned me out… 🙁
Vaccination would be much more cost effective. If researchers could produce a safe live attenuated virus or even a killed virus that would stimulate the body to produce the hundreds of antibodies which are effective against Ebola. The problem with present vaccines is that the makers are timid because of lawsuits and anti-vaccine crusaders who demand that they prove that vaccines have no ill effects ever. In a sense the test vaccines now in the pipeline are a crap shoot hoping that the one or few antigens included in the vaccines are enough to protect those who have been vaccinated.
35 is very young in modern science: Most people with PhDs and a post-doc are in their late 20s/early 30s