Nanoparticle Completely Eradicates Hepatitis C Virus 104
Diggester writes "While Americans worry every year about getting a flu shot or preventing HIV/AIDS, the deadlier silent killer is actually Hepatitis C, killing over 15,000 people yearly in the U.S. since 2007 — and the numbers continue to increase as the carriers increase in age. While there is no vaccine, there is hope in nanoparticle technology. The breakthrough came from a group of researchers at the University of Florida, creating a 'nanozyme' that eliminates the Hep C 100% of the time; before now, the six-month treatment would only work about half the time. The particles are coated with two biological agents, the identifier and the destroyer; the identifier recognizes the virus and sends the destroyer off to eliminate the mRNA which allows Hep C to replicate." Reader Joiseybill adds a link to coverage in the IEEE Spectrum, and points out that the 100 percent success rate, while encouraging, is so far only in the lab.
Deadlier? (Score:5, Informative)
"While Americans worry every year about getting a flu shot or preventing HIV/AIDS, the deadlier silent killer is actually Hepatitis C, killing over 15,000 ..."
The flu kills each year an average number of 25000-36000 people in the US, depending on the statistics.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.htm [cdc.gov]
Re:Deadlier? (Score:5, Informative)
Hepatitis C (and hepatitis B), on the other hand, leads to cirrhosis, hepatocellular cellular carcinoma and liver failure. It is exactly one of those diseases which will cause deterioration of the patient's health to such extent that a flu could kill.
It is rather unfair to compare Hep C to Flu in terms of mortality.
Re:Deadlier? (Score:5, Informative)
Hepatitis viral infections are also not self-limiting, hep C is pretty ugly too in that it limits transplant options(read; hep c = no transplants for you) which can be a pretty shitty situation for kidney transplant candidates that can get infected by dialysis catethers and whatnot and be excluded from the queue.
Hep B is pretty nasty too, hard to treat, survives well in the outside environment and about as virulent as a cat video on youtube.
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the virulence of hepatitis B is quite low in terms of environmental source. it is primarily transmitted by body fluid transmission.
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Likewise. Getting a flu shot makes me feel terrible for a week, and I've yet (knock on wood) to get it since I stopped getting the shots.
Re:Deadlier? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Deadlier? (Score:5, Insightful)
"While Americans worry every year about getting a flu shot or preventing HIV/AIDS, the deadlier silent killer is actually Hepatitis C, killing over 15,000 ..."
The flu kills each year an average number of 25000-36000 people in the US, depending on the statistics.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.htm [cdc.gov]
the flu kills more then terrorist, yet we spend more money defending against terrorist.
wtf?
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Things like the Flu, and even the common cold, rarely kill directly. It normally exaccerbates existing conditions by weakening the body and allowing said existing conditions to worsen.
My uncle died of liver failure, but he contracted MRSA while in hospital, and while it was the liver that gave in, the MRSA caused him to deteriorate rapidly.
Flu (be it seasonal or one of these 'super flus'), MRSA and colds rarely kill on their own.
If all you have is Hep C, yeah, you're in trouble.
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How does curing disease satisfy the libido dominandi?
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More interestingly, if the terrorists attacked solely critical care centres and retirement homes the outcry would most likely be greater. But flu works exactly the opposite (it gets less attention because it mostly kills those groups).
I'm not going either direction here, I don't care enough about other people to give a damn which is the "correct" attitude. I just find it quite interesting.
Stop thinking! (Score:2)
There is only doom the way you are going. Stop hinking now, and we may keep our cars. You know, everybody loves cars (to the point of insisting to spend endless hours inside them every day), and if you go that way, well, you'll discover that we should stop spending money on the death machines^W^W i mean... cars.
Also, everybody knows that cars are the single product that moves the economy nowadays. If we stopped manufacturing them, unenployment would rise to unprecedented levels (by the way, did you already
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Easy (Score:5, Funny)
So take everyone to the lab for treatment. Duh.
Re:Easy (Score:4, Funny)
Only if you're at risk. As this is a sexually transmitted disease and this is Slashdot...
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If hepatitis C is a sexually transmitted disease, then I should have contracted it -- a woman I was dating about 5 years ago had it. Unlike the other two forms of hepatitis, C is very hard to catch. Usually it comes from dirty needles, a woman can get it from anal sex (yuck).
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Did you go the Pegasys route? What genotype? Did it work? No need to answer if you think I am being rude and/or nosy.
Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
What a cunt. They're human beings.
You think people who take drugs don't deserve to live? Fine. Go and live in a world without all the music, books and films created by drug users. No more Rolling Stones for you. No more Burroughs. No more Blake or Shelley. No Hunter S Thompson. No Carl Sagan. None of the beauty and insights and technical leaps forward that people who take drugs have given the world.
In fact, no more computers for you. Piss off.
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And what about doctor's who are working on a hep C patient who are exposed to the virus? Guess we should just let them die, too. Serves them right for trying to help a 'druggie'.
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It's only sexually transmitted if one of the people was shooting up.
Allow me to add: fuck you.
The only needles I ever had in my veins were in the hospital, and unless they were shooting me up with heroin in used needles at age 2, your drug use reference is insulting, wrong, and simply moronic.
Realize this: until the 1989, Hep C wasn't even a recognized virus; at least as far as the patient was concerned. The diagnosis was viral non-A non-B hepatitis. Whether it was even contagious, or how it was transmitted other than blood-to-blood was not known; how long you were infec
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Pamela Anderson is back on the bang list!
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One of my favourite bits from QI:
Alan Davies: Eight hundred Americans die in a McDonald's every year.
Rich Hall: Which one? Best to avoid that one.
mice or men (Score:5, Funny)
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would have been nice for mice to be mentioned in the summary since it appears only to apply to them. lucky dogs
Lucky dogs??!?! How would you like your assigned tasks from your boss to consist of:
1. Get infected with contagious disease
2. Try out some cures to see if they work
3. ????
4. Profit! (well - for your boss that is)
Re:A cure will never be FDA approved (Score:4, Informative)
That is a cynical idea, ok drug companies might prefer long term treatments to cures. But for insurance companies and nationalised health care systems cost is more important.
luckily the FDA can only rule on drugs for Americans in the USA. In Ireland I got prescribed a drug treatment here that was approved eventually by the FDA. I'm very happy for it being available to me sooner rather than later, and i am sure Americans are now seeing the benefits now they can have it too.
Re:A cure will never be FDA approved (Score:5, Funny)
Dress up like a horse and go to a vet and you can get gene therapy and stem cells treatments.
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But if the treatment fails you get shot.
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Maybe health insurance companies should start buying pharma companies? That might change a few things.
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If insurance companies owned pharma companies. You might find a particular drug is only available to people on that insurance companies plans or maybe available at an inflated price.
Insurance companies are not in the business of helping anyone. Every claim is a loss to them. You would need a non-profit company or state funded pharma, not impossible in some parts of the world but maybe illegal if the recent story where the NSA might be in trouble for developing their own software is illegal, then it's highly
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However a 97% effective life-long treatment will be "safe" and approved.
Reduce the dosage until its only 97% effective, then rinse -n- repeat every 6 months or whatever as the virus regains a foothold.
Its a recipe for developing treatment resistance, but that just means more R+D profit, so...
Remember homeopathic stuff doesn't work. At some dilution the treatment effectiveness will drop from 100% to 97%.
Also you can mix stuff in as a "manufacturing byproduct" if necessary to encourage long term treatment WRT the byproducts. Maybe lead or mercury resulting in semi-permanent lon
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The problem there is that after a few rounds you're producing virii which are immune to the treatment, which rapidly becomes worthless.
Would this not be like evolving a virus that is immune to bleach or autoclaves?
i.e. because it is attacking the RNA itself you would just alter the code that the marker is searching for?
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Re:A cure will never be FDA approved (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention that nearly every other country (even including those in Europe!) have more access to cutting edge treatments.
Unfortunately, most Americans won't think to really look abroad because they think that the US is the most advanced nation in the world and that they can really get the best care there.
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Same here in Canada. We're taught from an early age that we have the best health care system in the world, and everyone here believes it.
I'll keep this short, but we had a baby here in Canada and then we had our second child in Mexico, both were Cesarean. The care we received in Mexico was 100 times better than what we got in Canada. No waiting, no crappy attitude from nurses and doctors.. We had complications here in Canada but not in Mexico, and I believe that's due to a better doctor doing a more car
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At least you have options with visible tradeoffs. You can get the free treatment at home, though the quality will suffer, or you can get expensive treatment abroad, and the quality will be higher, but so will the price tag and travel costs (not to mention the viability of traveling via plane if you're going into labor/labour)
Here in the US, the default option is expensive, poorly staffed, and the work is mediocre. Not much of an "Option A"
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I read an article that said the worst thing that ever happened to Canadian health care was for us to be situated next to the USA. Our system is leaps and bounds ahead of theirs, but because that's the metric by which we compare everything, we end up with a lousier system than somewhere like Mexico, or what they have in Scandinavia.
A friend of mine went to Holland to visit family. For her to get an ultrasound booked (because her family can't be back in Canada for the birth) was faster and cheaper in Holland-
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I got three stitches in a hospital 2 years ago. $2,000 with insurance discount (without reaching my deductible). And afaik there's no way to shop around for a cheap hospital, they don't post prices.
Dental tourism (Score:2)
It goes for dental work too. If you need something particularly expensive, like a dental immplant, you could save money doing it in Barbados rather than the U.S. even with the airfare and hotel bill. (And yes, they have good dentistry there.)
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But don't you worry they'll just put you out and steal your kidney?!
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Actually, having lived both in the U.S. and in the Caribbean, I think there are more thieves in the American healthcare system.
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Probably - but I always feel weird being a foreigner.
Why was parent poster modded down? (Score:1)
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Well if one of the pharma-mega-corps has the patents on the HepC treatment and a different company comes up with the cure...they'd love to make some money and cut off a competitor's money supply wouldn't they?
It is wonderful, but it's only in mice (Score:4, Insightful)
Back then, avastin, glivec and so on were expected to be magical cures for cancers.. now they exist only as expensive life-prolonging (with or without quality) therapy and only for those who are rich.
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His point about those treatments being "only for the rich" still holds though.
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Only for the rich or those who live in a country with universal healthcare.
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they can now choose
(1) to die now and leave a fortune to their wife, sons and daughters
(2) to die later and leave everyone broke
and that is a difficult question. when i worked back then as a junior doctor in an oncology center, they had trouble buying those "expensive" "next generation" chemotherapy which may last a few cycle (only), which was already a money hog to the family... now they have
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The difference here is the buzz word nano. If the new treatment is a true nano cure, then the difference between this and the old "magical cures" would be the difference between using a drone strike to target the headquarters of a terrorist group versus bombing the village where the headquarters happen to be found.
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Mod parent up. I've seen countless reports of drugs or techniques that work in immuno-compromised mice or other animals that fail to work when translated to human trials, or worse, cannot be replicated by other labs.
This report, while interesting, is not news -- it's a stepping stone to gain further funding by the researchers for the next step. Once this works decently in humans, then we have a story...
Re:100% ?!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Duh. The test on rats so far showed no side-effects which makes it better than radiation or incinerating the rats to kill the virus.
Re:100% ?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
But it uses the word "nano" so it must work.
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I wish people would get that chemistry != nanotechnology.
Our world is filled with nanoscale molecules, including many that we designed and created, but the word "nanotechnology" was specifically coined to describe building things by the manipulation of individual atoms.
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I wish people would get that chemistry != nanotechnology.
Our world is filled with nanoscale molecules, including many that we designed and created, but the word "nanotechnology" was specifically coined to describe building things by the manipulation of individual atoms.
Unless you count crystals like diamond as one big molecule... I am pretty sure every molecule is nanoscale. Even . [wikipedia.org]
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Success Rate (Score:5, Informative)
The previous treatment with ribavirin and interferon for one year had a 50% success rate. The newer six month treatment with the addition of Incivek for three months has over 75% rate. Since Incivek has only been on the market for about a year, that success rate is not as precise as it will be.
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Next up... (Score:5, Funny)
Hepatitis C++? Hepatitis C#?
Objective Hepatitis C. *shudders*
Go Gators (Score:1)
Missing the real progress... (Score:2)
This is non-news. Cures which work in cell cultures are a dime a dozen. This is at least six years from going to market, and has >95% chance to fail as an actual drug.
The real progress are the recently introduced, FDA-approved treatments by Vertex, Merck (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/23/us-vertex-idUSTRE74M3I320110523) and soon Gilead (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/19/us-bristolmyers-hepatitis-idUSBRE83I0T920120419). These are really fantastic advances in the treatment of that disease.
Dilemma (Score:2)
Jenny McCarthy is no doubt torn right now, between her hatred of vaccines and the desire to eradicate the HepC she no doubt has.
Awesome, keep it going! (Score:2)
If we can program these nano cells to attack, all these, including aids and cancer...that would be the real deal right there....!
I wonder if you can reprogram it to remove old cells so as not to allow aging to happen too?
Too late (Score:1)
While interesting, this research is far too late to be remotely useful. There are multiple Phase III trials currently ongoing with new generations of HCV treatments - at least one of these will become the de facto standard of treatment for HCV cures in the future, with REAL human cure rates of > 90% if not 100%, depending on genotype and statues re: failed previous treatment courses of course. That puts them about 8 years ahead of these guys. Interesting science though, and I wish them luck.
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On behalf of Slashdot, I'd like to let you know the feelings of the posters:
Fuck off.
Forums slide because of ACs like yourself. There's rarely a good reason to go full AC on here.