virology
sa smith | February 6, 2016Listen, nobody thinks the guy who 'cured Charlie Sheen of HIV' cured Charlie Sheen of HIV.
Even Charlie Sheen.
Dr Sam
I was with u in
Mexico for
1 day.
It's illegal for u
to practice in
U.S.A. where u
treated me for 2 months
© https://t.co/lKv6YPYdhm
— Charlie Sheen (@charliesheen) February 1, 2016
... But what if he could, tho?
What would this super awesome therapy THE MAN doesnt want you to know about look like? How would it work?
That would be a fun and educational game to play!
Okay, to play this game you first have to understand what 'CAEV' is. Caprine arthritis-encephalitis virus is a…
sa smith | October 30, 2015April 7, 2010:
Using HSV-1 to cure metastatic melanoma
May 26, 2015:
WHOOOO!!!!! GMO HSV-1 vs Cancer
October 27, 2015:
FDA approves first-of-its-kind product for the treatment of melanoma
Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States. Melanoma, one type of skin cancer, is the leading cause of skin cancer related deaths, and is most often caused by exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light. According to the National Cancer Institute approximately 74,000 Americans will be diagnosed with melanoma and nearly 10,000 will die from the disease in 2015.
Imlygic, a genetically modified…
sa smith | July 21, 2015I love this. I love this so much.
Jim Carrey and his anti-vax comrades know literally nothing about vaccines, how they are developed, and how they work. Vaccines do not cause autism.
... But... what if a vaccine *did* end up having a pretty 'bad' side-effect (outside of something expected, high fever, allergic reaction, etc)?
How would scientists know?
Would it be covered up by Big Pharma and the League of Evil Immunologists?
Would The Truth come out when some post-doc henchman has a change of heart and runs to the internet to write a blog post Expose?
!!!!!!
This is what happens when…
sa smith | May 27, 2015WHOOOOOOOO!!!!
April 7, 2010:
Using HSV-1 to cure metastatic melanoma
May 26, 2015:
Talimogene Laherparepvec Improves Durable Response Rate in Patients With Advanced Melanoma
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
They just published the results of Phase III clinical trials of a herpes simplex-1 genetically modified to kill cancers, specifically, advanced melanoma.
The GMO virus has a name now: T-VEC.
And instead of looking at 50 patients who all got the virus, this study was a group of 436 patients , randomly assigned 2:1 to a treatment (T-VEC) group, or GM-CSF only group (the immunostimulatory molecule…
sa smith | April 14, 2015One of my favorite stories is the tale of a GMO virus deployed to treat Hemophilia B:
Gene therapy for Hemophilia B
... Hemophilia B is a disease in males caused by point mutations/deletions/etc in the clotting Factor IX gene. If you dont make Factor IX, you wont clot properly, and will have all of the health issues we associate with hemophilia.
... The scientists in this paper took six Hemophilia B patients, and treated them with an Adeno-Associated Virus-8 (two at low, medium, and high doses of virus) that contained a functional copy of the Factor IX gene.
Four of them of them bumped up…
sa smith | February 26, 2015This past weekend I hung out at a brand-spanking new con, the Atlanta SciFi and Fantasy Expo. Made a bunch of new friends-- including the proud owner of an actual T.A.R.D.I.S. Randy and I had a marvelous time talking about ghosts, yetis, and vaccines/viruses. I sent him a link to my FreeOK talks including this one:
Randy booped right back with this:
NIH moving ahead with review of risky virology studies (February 25, 2015)
I gave that talk June 23, 2012, but I started talking about one topic in that presentation a bit earlier:
OMFG KILLER FLU WARBLEGARBLE TERRORISM AAAAAAAAAH!!! (April 2,…
sa smith | October 21, 2014Remember how I said my lab wanted to do a PPE response video to Sanjay Guptas terrifying attempt? But we couldnt for liability reasons?
Now there is an even better option! We can all take a peek into how Ebola patients are treated at Emory University, and get to see their protocols for putting on/taking off PPE:
Emory Healthcare launches Ebola protocols website as resource on prevention and patient care
But before you can see their videos, you have to 1) register, and 2) agree not to hold Emory University responsible if you get infected with Ebola.
The information provided on this site,…
sa smith | August 25, 2014One wonderful thing that has come two US citizens being infected Ebola (and successfully treated for the disease) is *education* the general public is getting about this, frankly, 'scary' virus.
Im not talking about the bizarre nonsense/missed opportunity posted by Sanjay Gupta and his 'producer' Danielle Dellorto. Of course science bloggers have capitalized on this opportunity to educate people (its kinda what we *do*). But some journalists in main-stream-media, unlike Gupta and Dellorto, have taken a moment to speak to actual scientists working on Ebola/the technology to make the 'secret…
sa smith | August 4, 2014Oh, Sanjay Gupta.
Secret serum likely saved Ebola patients (warning: link has auto-play video, ugh)
Three top secret, experimental vials stored at subzero temperatures were flown into Liberia last week in a last-ditch effort to save two American missionary workers who had contracted Ebola, according to a source familiar with details of the treatment.
There was nothing top-secret about the experimental treatment given to the US Ebola patients.
The 'secret serum' is just a monoclonal antibody therapy for Ebola. Administering exogenous antibodies as a therapy for viral infections is an old-as-…
sa smith | May 16, 2014So scientists cured a woman of a pervasive, treatment resistant multiple myeloma.
With a genetically modified, vaccine strain measles virus.
Remission of Disseminated Cancer After Systemic Oncolytic Virotherapy
*anti-vax-anti-GMOers-heads-explode*
The media is going nuts over this, but this is not a new idea/approach. Measles, and certain other viruses, can be domesticated and modified to kill cancers-- we call them oncolytic viruses.
Sometimes we straight-up genetically modify viruses for the explicit purpose of attacking a cancer. We have done this with Newcastle virus vs prostate cancer,…
sa smith | May 15, 2014There has recently been (more) discussion about whether the US should destroy its remaining stocks of the smallpox virus:
Are We There Yet? The Smallpox Research Agenda Using Variola Virus
Like measles, smallpox is a human-only pathogen. There are not bat or pig reservoirs out there-- smallpox is only in people. So with effective, world-wide vaccination efforts, we eradicated smallpox.
Kind of.
It no longer infects humans, and hasnt for a long time. If you were born >1982, you probably never even had to get the vaccine.
... But the virus is not extinct. It still exists in one laboratory in…
sa smith | April 29, 2014If we vaccinated everyone who could be medically vaccinated against measles, measles would be eradicated.
Though there are other measles-like viruses, humans are the only hosts for what we commonly refer to as 'measles'.
Use vaccines to cut humans out of the equation? Extinct virus.
Its that 'easy'.
Unfortunately, measles 'wants' to exist, and they have human hosts, anti-vaxers, to help it stay alive.
Wat do?
Invent a shelf-stable oral drug that slows down measles infections, thats wat do:
An Orally Available, Small-Molecule Polymerase Inhibitor Shows Efficacy Against a Lethal Morbillivirus…
sa smith | July 23, 2013The best mysteries are ones where the reader, if they are following along carefully, can figure out the answer to the problem as the lead characters do.
If you read science blogs and love evolution, then you know exactly where this is headed:
Molecular evolution in court: analysis of a large hepatitis C virus outbreak from an evolving source.
Lets say you are an epidemiologist, and youve noticed something peculiar-- numerous individuals have turned up with Hepatitis C infections. Well, people get HepC all the time, thats not noteworthy. BUT... there were a *lot* of people getting sick. Not…
sa smith | June 3, 2013Michael Douglass recently announced that his battle with throat cancer was instigated by HPV.
We have known for a long time that males can benefit from the HPV vaccine series. I wrote this back in 2011:
CDC recommends HPV vaccine for boys!
It would be great, for women, if boys got the vaccine too. Of course, boys cannot get cervical cancer, but they can carry the virus and infect women and give them cervical cancer. Eliminated boys as carriers protects women. BUT…
We cannot, ethically, ask boys to get a vaccine that has risks with no/little benefit to themselves just to protect other people…
sa smith | April 8, 2013There is another new bird flu.
H7N9 Bird Flu Cases Reach 21 In China; Death Total Unchanged At Six
More bird flu cases reported in China
New deadly bird flu virus infects at least 20 in China
The NPR article is quite good:
Human Cases Of Bird Flu In China Draw Scrutiny
This 'bird flu' is not that bird flu. But many of the same basic principles still apply (srsly, read that article).
There is no reason to freak out about this 'new' bird flu yet. It does not appear to be transmitting human-to-human, and as I said in the previous article, 'death rates' from infection in impoverished regions…
sa smith | March 1, 2013Another day, another disease treatment strategy based off a genetically modified virus!
Prostate Specific Antigen Retargeted Recombinant Newcastle Disease Virus for Prostate Cancer Virotherapy.
This one is so clever, you guys. It is so freaking clever!
Some of you might know that sometimes, when prostate cancer is present, there is an elevated level of 'Prostate Specific Antigen'. Physicians used to test for elevated PSA levels as a test for prostate cancer, but because it lead to over-diagnosis/unnecessary treatments, its not anymore.
But lets say you *know* prostate cancer is there, and it…
sa smith | February 18, 2013This is ridiculous. After all of the papers I have read, written about, the new stuff we can do with GMO viruses...I can still be amazed. This is insane:
Randomized dose-finding clinical trial of oncolytic immunotherapeutic vaccinia JX-594 in liver cancer
The patients in this study had liver cancer. Specifically, malignant hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In general, someone diagnosed with HCC can expect to live 3-6 months.
These patients had already failed conventional therapies, so they were looking at 2-4 months.
So they tried the best kind of alternative therapy-- Not witch doctors or…
sa smith | February 8, 2013I dont know why he took it down, but Ricky Gervais Tweeted the following a few days ago:
Any virologists or medical experts out there? What WOULD win out of AIDS & Rabies?
Maybe he took it down because he thought it was insensitive or something, but I think its a totally normal, valid question for a layman to have!
What WOULD win out of AIDS & Rabies steel-cage death-match????
First, a clarification. AIDS is the syndrome caused by infection by HIV-1. HIV-1 is the virus, not AIDS :)
Who would win in an HIV-1 vs rabies battle depends on how they are 'battling', and what signifies a '…
sa smith | January 31, 2013I wish I wish I wish this article was open access! ARG!!
Gene therapy clinical trials worldwide to 2012 - an update
This article is a great review of gene therapy as a therapy, and how it has evolved from an experiment that killed children to an accepted therapy that is saving and improving lives.
Here is a list of all the diseases that have been/are/will be treated with gene therapy:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23355455
These are trials in humans-- this list doesnt include all of the therapies that are still in the tissue culture/animal model segments of the pipeline. Can anyone…
sa smith | January 24, 2013YAAAAAAAAAAY!!!
You know that 'killer bird flu' I talked about at FreeOK2? Last year some governments FREAKED OUT because scientists evolved a mammal-to-mammal transmissible bird flu in the lab, and the government officials were concerned that The Worlds Stupidest Terrorists would try to use it as a weapon. Somehow. For some reason.
Whatever.
Finally, despite stupid government officials stupid concerns, two papers were published that demonstrated the obvious benefits of performing this kind of research: knowledge about how a mammal transmissible could evolve, and what are the odds of this…