'Safe Ebola' Created for Research 198
Nephrite writes "By removing a gene from the virus Ebola, UW-Madison scientists have managed to stop the deadly pathogen from replicating. This first step may be a start down the path to a vaccine or drug screening. 'The scientists still want the virus to replicate in order to study it, so they developed monkey kidney cells which contained the protein needed. Because the cell was providing the protein, and not the virus itself, it could only replicate within those cells, and even if transferred into a human, would be harmless.'"
load of monkey kidney's (Score:2)
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The university tried to open a line of communication with the president to reason with him but was met with difficulty when he retired to the war room to pout and 'play with his toys.'
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Look, the people studying ebola are smart and they are safe. The people at the CDC and elsewhere have, I'm sure, explored the full spectrum of Michael Crichton related disasters. They may even have considered some other pulp fiction horrors, as well as actual real life threats.
Vira
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Someone else further down noted that for a tech site slashdot sure seems to have a lot of luddites.
Anyways, apologies again - nothing personal.
No way to RTFA (Score:5, Funny)
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Scientists have made the lethal virus Ebola harmless in the lab, potentially aiding research into a vaccine or cure.
Taking a single gene from the virus stops it replicating, US scientists wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
Ebola, currently handled in highly secure labs, kills up to 80% of those it infects.
However, one expert said the new method may not yet be a fail-safe way of dealing with the virus.
We wanted to
Hmmm.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Cheers!
Strat
Before you panic (Score:5, Informative)
Currently, only a few groups have access to BSL4 laboratories, and this has been severely hampering Ebola research. If by taking out the VP30 gene they have reduced the pathogenicity of the virus enough to get the authorities to apply the more appropriate BSL3 tag to the mutant strain, they've succeeded in making an important stride towards expanding the field, while introducing a very minimal risk of an outbreak.
I don't think anyone is talking about drinking the recombinant virus, but merely making it BSL3 instead of BSL4... or even just reducing the risk of working with Ebola under BSL4 conditions.
Ummm... (Score:2)
No citations, but it's about what I remember from reading The Hot Zone.
Re:Before you panic (Score:5, Funny)
""We wanted to make biologically contained Ebola virus so that we can drink it," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka.
And if you're going to point out that I simply added the part in bold myself, then I can onlly say in my defense that it is probably what Yoshihiro Kawoaka is thinking anyway.
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Re:Before you panic (Score:5, Interesting)
The strain Ebola-Reston is airborne, fortunately, it appears, the air-borne mutation also makes it non-lethal to humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_Reston/ [wikipedia.org]
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So we're safe as long as we don't touch or have sex with any UW-Madison scientists, or their monkeys.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_Reston [wikipedia.org]
You might of forgotten this one, it was in the news a long time ago, but it shows that the virus can become airborne. And this is why it is so important that this strain be developed: We need to make a vaccine for this asap.
And on another point: frankly I am a little pissed that once a virus is considered "beaten", we stop mass vaccinations for it, allowing it the chance of it to slowly spread back. If I didn't have cow
Thanks, but I'll panic now. (Score:2)
Unfortunately there is a variety of hemorrhagic fever that IS easily transmitted, probably airborne. It arrived in the east coast US with a shipment of primates and wiped them out in a lab. (Fortunately it was not transmissible to humans or we would have had quite the epidemic on our hands.)
Though ebola is not airborne (so far) it is very easily transmitted by contact - especially since it causes major fluid leakage.
If by taking
Re:Before you panic (Score:4, Insightful)
Just a guess, but for some people, a cure to this miserable disease, and for others, one heck of a biological weapon. It is so limited in transmission that one might feel safe using it in certain situations to cripple an enemy. It is so incredibly debilitating while one has it that it would render combatants or other individuals incapacitated and too weak once they recovered, though they probably would not recover.
Ebola is just another tool in this case.
InnerWeb
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Most ebola outbreaks only kill a few hundred p
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From TFA (Score:2)
OK, I'm not an expert in biosecurity, but wouldn't the reduced air pressure in the room be accomplished by pumping air out of the room?
Re:From TFA (Score:4, Informative)
The idea is that when you take air out of the room, you control the path of the outflow, and thus you can filter the particulates, including viruses. Otherwise, when you open the door, they just tend to diffuse out.
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...air pressure in the room is less than the pressure outside, so any leak would mean air flowing inwards rather than outwards. ...
OK, I'm not an expert in biosecurity, but wouldn't the reduced air pressure in the room be accomplished by pumping air out of the room?
Off course the experts have thought of that and put the exhaust of the pumps right next to the leaks so the air will get sucked in again immediately.
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If the secure research facility is air-tight, pumping a little bit of air out would produce a vacuum / differential pressure (compared to the positive pressure suit systems) that would could be maintained without pumping out any more air.
Furthermore, the little bit of air that does get pumped out can be processed to eliminate or kill viruses -- it can be filtered, passe
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So long as they're not playing with the Andromeda strain, we ought to be safe.
I actually walked past the hot lab building daily when I did my undergrad. I think it was level 3. I'm still here.
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-nB
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cancer and vaccines (Score:4, Interesting)
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We keep washing 99.9999% of germs and bacteria off ourselves and we seem to be getting sicker and the germs seems to be getting tougher (MRSA [wikipedia.org]). When I was a kid was played in dirt then came in and grabbed a sammich and went out to play more... Damn life was sweet... Most of us are fine! It's not until we get into the "bacterial hand lotion" kicks that I see my peers dropping like flies...
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sigh.. the most common active compound in antibacterial soaps, lotions etc. is Triclosan. It is rather disturbing to see it used as widely as it is because of the risk of selecting for triclosan resistance. it's a never ending arms race, we make new antibiotics, they develop a way to inactivate or efficiently pump the drug out of their cells. the only thing that has a real chance a
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"Man, I just keep thinking of MI:2 where they make a super virus because they where trying to make a super vaccine."
No they were making a super virus as a weapon they just developed the vaccine first..
"The plot (or more accurately, the excuse for the movie) revolves around a manmade biological weapon called "Chimera" that's been seized by rogue agent Sean Ambrose (a lightweight Dougray Scott). Now Ambrose and his band of generic thugs need to get their hands on the bug's antidote in order to execute th
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Genetics.... (Score:2, Funny)
Don't the scientists know that the original virus leapt from monkeys to humans just like HIV.
Hell we can't even classify virus as a living or non-living thing.
And now our irrational scientists like John Hammond think they can tinker...
Although on one hand i support them, ebola is tooo dangerous to escape from the funny farm. if it had been smallpox or something it would be understandable.
Thi
Re:Genetics.... (Score:5, Insightful)
We would like to study ebola, so that we can save your sorry ass if you get it. To do that, we've modified it to weaken it, so we don't kill ourselves studying it. We're not really going to put it in your food and air supply!
As far as why Bush hates funding genetic engineering as a whole you're correct. Your post illustrates PRECISELY why people hate funding it - they are ignorant, scared sheet, and content remaining such.
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Also, this would fix the overpopulation troubles. Unfortunately most humans don't quite want to risk their lives to kill a single boring virus.
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Although on one hand i support them, ebola is tooo dangerous to escape from the funny farm. if it had been smallpox or something it would be understandable.
Smallpox is far more dangerous and has killed more than a thousand times as many people as Ebola. Ebola is actually relatively easy to contain, though quite deadly. Smallpox is deadly and far more easily spread. And most people under 40 in the developed world are not vaccinated against smallpox. So a smallpox release has a far greater potential danger.
How much do we know about virii to safely declare legally that this ebola virus would not leap from monkeys to humans.
First, the standard English plural of virus is viruses. Second, I don't think the courts have anything to do with whether or not a crippled virus is safe an
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The ancient speakers of Latin similarly didn't use a plural form of virus, so when people pluralize it using the rules of ancient Latin they come
The Sky is falling (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure Ebola is dangerous, but labs are working around the world with massively dangerous pathogens. Britain's numpties in the bio-farming area managed to release Foot and Mouth into the wild (genius) so of course there is a risk. The question is whether it is safe and what can be achieved by doing this, not simply thinking about the Horror flick that played a ridiculous story line out. Bio-shock story lines are just as realistic as techno-shock ones, i.e. about as realistic as a George Bush explanation on Iraqi WMD.
Bio-science is one of the most real frontiers in science today and its simply stunning what is being done. Sure there need to be controls, but educated people need to stop behaving like Fox News Anchors.
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Worrisome, most certainly.
Out of all the techs we've yet produced as a race, all of them (with the possible exception of the nascent self-replicating nanotechnology field) have been firmly controlled by humanity.
Biotech on the other hand, we create something, and when it leaves (and sometimes before it leaves) the 'home', it gets all grown up, with the possibility of getting a serious attitude of it's own and some seriously big boots to come back kicking with.
With all our machin
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You're right. If those evil scientists keep tinkering around with Ebola like this, it might end up turning into something really bad.
All sarcasm aside, creating less-pathogenic versions of deadly viruses is one of the best techniques available to provide h
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That is a bit simplistic. The story summary is pretty neutral, and the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag is a humorous tag used for many stories. Actually, reading the list [slashdot.org]
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Um.... (Score:2, Informative)
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Demon in the Freezer was great and scared the bejesus out of me. I read that one and one other on Smallpox having thought Ebola was the worst there was. Now I know that Smallpox is far far far worse than Ebola ever hopes to be.
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It's extremely dangerous NOT to be playing with ebola. If the virus mutates a little so that it's a bit less deadly, or kills more slowly, then it will be far more of a threat than it is now. That's why we research it now.
treat the host pool (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why imho vaccine efforts should be directed at the animal host pool in order to eradicate the filovirus, ie make it extinct.
The host is widely considered to be bats http://www.emedicine.com/MED/topic626.htm [emedicine.com] and if only a tiny portion of the grant money spent on dna twiddling was spent establishing this and looking at either eradicating the bats or vaccinating them then, perhaps, the whole filovirus family could be eradicated.
Before all the bat-lovers start crying foul I would like to point out that it is only ebola's high mortality rate that keeps it contained. If mother nature dose a bit of her own dna twiddling and hits the sweet spot for mortality versus infectivity then haemorrhagic fever will reach Hollywood proportions.
But, call me cynical, this would leave no recurring income for vaccine makers.
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Too late.
IANABE, but bats have been known to eat flying insects on occasion. Seems to me that this kind of tinkering has been shown repeatedly to produce unintended consquences. In this case, I'd wager the end result would be something along the lines of less bats -> more mosquitos -> more mosquito problems -> more malaria. Or, from the malaria tinkerers perspective, more bats -> less malaria -> more ebola. Given that malaria is a greater p
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But, call me cynical, this would leave no recurring income for vaccine makers.
Um, cynical wasn't exactly the word I was thinking of. Though since you can't seem to afford a clue, I'll give you one. Vaccine research is a money-loser unless you come up with an effective vaccine for western diseases - and even then its risky. At best vaccines generate $6 billion annually - that's about 1.5% of the annual pharmaceutical market worldwide. The problem is, an effective vaccine is used only a few times, and is highly cost effective. So there is not so much profit to be made. Moreover, you w
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Actually, that's not totally true. Ebola infection has spread in rural African villages mainly because of lack of education. Relatives of people who have died of Ebola make the mistake of directly handling the body during burial procedures, thus coming into contact with infected blood. I suppose that if Ebola had a lower mortality rate then it would become a sexually-tr
Nerves of steel (Score:2)
Re:Nerves of steel (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you think happens should "something go wrong" when you're assembling a skyscraper? Pouring molten steel? Flying a plane? Heck, just driving a car can kill you in the most horrible ways.
If you want safe, you're pretty much hosed.
If you want to balance risk with precaution, work in an industry where the life and death of not just you, but lots of others are on the line. You'll quickly find that the level of precaution taken is burdensome, but quite reassuring.
PS: It doesn't kill everyone. To quote Wikipedia:
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola [wikipedia.org] (citation from http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol11no02/04-0533.htm [cdc.gov])
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A few years later, my brother-in-law worked for a lab working on rhinovirus and caught a cold.
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It's fair enough to say that any job involves risks, and it certainly sounds as if this Ebola replicon is reasonably safe. On the other hand I would require convincing evidence that the virus cannot mutate to replicate without VP30, which apparently is mainly a transcription activator. Because this virus maintains its genome as RNA without ever encoding it in DNA, it has a very high mutation rate. Or that it cannot pick up a suitable gene by hybridization; co-infection with another negative strand RNA virus
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Wow what bad logic. Do you not understand that a different level of safety can apply for the worker than to the consumer in an industry. For example a coal miner may be at large risk of the mine collapsing on his sorry behind, the power engineer could be sitting on a power plant
One has to wonder if the 'safe virus itself' (Score:2)
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FYI, there is already an ebola vaccine (Score:2, Interesting)
Easier solution (Score:2)
Now they won't need to activate that laboratory self-destruct!
Aim for the head (Score:5, Funny)
The scientists still want the virus to replicate in order to study it, so they developed monkey kidney cells which contained the protein needed.
Hey, isn't that how the Rage virus got started? Pretty soon those monkeys will develop a taste for human brains, the military will see this as a promising new bio-weapon and, 28 days later, Milla Jovovich is naked on your shower floor washing away the zombie blood...again.
Do these people NEVER learn?
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Only eight genes? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Sounds good (Score:2)
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This is how weaponized strains are made (Score:2, Interesting)
Therefore in order for a strain to be adequately weaponized, it needs to be developed into something that 1) takes effect [i.e. incapacitates] very quickly after exposure, 2) doesn't linger [unless an area denial weapon is sought] and 3) doesn't spread too far outside those affected by the original deployment. This is why anthrax is close to an ideal biological weapo
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Remember how the US was said to only use white phosphorous munitions to "light the battlefield" too? Except then reports came out about bodies in these battlefields that had been stripped of all flesh, literal
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Wouldn't white phosphorus also... you know... burn and MELT clothes?
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In order to weaponize something you might want to make it MORE infections so it can't spread so far. Ebola doesn't have that problem, it's already TOO infectious. You might want to make it non-airborne, so it won't spread to your own troops. But you want to make it good and infectious once it's introduced
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No, they have not. Ebola was never really "infectious" in the sense that you mean. A typical outbreak is confined to a single village, at which point the virus runs out of potential hosts. It is not airborne (except, as some have pointed out, in harmless variants) and there is no other way to catch it than by direct contact with the bodily fluids of the infected. Ironically, this
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But still, if you get every enemy soldier to line up for the biggest shot of their life you could easily wipe them all out with this strain.
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For some reason I still don't think it's going to become the next superweapon.
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Either way, agreed, not the next superweapon.
No BSL4 Lab at UW Madison (Score:2)
Googling "BSL4 wisconsin" will reveal many articles claiming that the university violated NIH guidelines to do this research, though it was authorized by the UW Institutional Biosafety Committee. Clearly, they have an interest in enabling research of this type at more institutions, given the great cost of operating a BSL4 facility. UW Madison lacks such a facility, yet has remained at the forefront of biotechnology research (having done pioneering work in the area of
Re:oops (Score:4, Insightful)
Why wouldn't you support that?
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I mean god damn, testing for effectiveness in animals before human trials and then widespread use, I mean why the hell would they ever do that?
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As much as I'd like to find a treatment/vaccine for something as nasty as Ebola, I'm not so sure tinkering around with its genetic code like this is such a good idea.
Well, then pretty much most of biomedical research on infectious agents is shit outta luck. How do you think he get live attenuated vaccines? How do you think a lot of HIV research is done?
Like others, I can't help but think about the paraphrased quote from Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way"; if that ever happens and that modified Ebola mutates and gets out of isolation, we are in a world of shit.
Like others I can't help but hope that research decision-makers and funders don't get their ideas about what research should be undertaken from bad science fiction.
(Note I said 'bad science fiction'. That does not imply that the fed shouldn't fund research into making a holodeck. That would be cool.)
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Well, regular in-the-wild ebola can also mutate into something more dangerous. I don't really see the chance for a dangerous mutation as substantially higher. Remember, these are labs that deal with extremely dangerous virus and are thus rather serious about nothing getting out.
What are the alternatives? Either working with regular, deadly Ebola (so if it escapes and infects someone, a lethal outbreak
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