[wordup] Designer Virus Stalks HIV

[Adam Shand]

I can see the future.  As the good guys invent cures, the bad guys 
invent diseases.  Much like many people go in to get flu shots, soon 
you'll have to get your yearly vaccination against the "shit Dr. Evil 
invented".

Naturally only the rich will suffer from these new diseases and the 
poor will have a surprising natural resistance.

Adam.

From: 
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,63441,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

Designer Virus Stalks HIV 
By Kristen Philipkoski

02:00 AM May. 13, 2004 PT

  BERKELEY, California -- It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just 
$200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. 
And that scares them.

  That's because the therapy itself is a virus. The Lawrence Berkeley 
National Laboratory assistant professors created a virus altered to 
latch onto HIV and mute its ability to become AIDS. They've tested the 
theory in a computer model, and in cells in a dish. The results have 
been promising, and if they continue in that vein, the researchers 
could begin animal testing by the end of this year.


  Arkin said this week at the International Biotech Summit at the 
University of California at Berkeley that it was almost too easy for 
him and his colleagues (Schaffer and then-grad student Leor Weinberger) 
to build the anti-HIV virus.

  "If I can do it, anyone can do it," Arkin said. "That's going to be a 
problem."

  Well, maybe not anyone. After all, Arkin, Schaffer and Weinberger, who 
was lead author on their Journal of Virology paper (reg. required) 
outlining a mathematic model of the system, are not your 
run-of-the-mill lab jockeys.

  Still, bad guys can be brilliant, too, which is even more reason for 
the good guys to understand new biotechnologies as thoroughly as 
possible.

  "The genie is out of the bottle, so we might as well study these 
things in earnest," Arkin said in an interview.

  Plus, the potential good could outweigh the bad. By using a computer 
model of what happens to the immune system when it's infected with HIV, 
Arkin and his colleagues have designed a potential AIDS treatment that 
would remain with the patient as long as he or she has HIV, meaning it 
would prevent AIDS from arising even in patients who otherwise would 
have developed the disease after a decade of latency. They also predict 
HIV would not become resistant to the virus.

  The treatment is made of a gutted HIV virus. The harmful parts of the 
virus are removed, and in their place the researchers have inserted a 
DNA cargo that inhibits HIV's ability to kill immune cells. It latches 
onto the natural HIV and spreads along with it, even from person to 
person.

  If this process sounds familiar, it's because it is essentially gene 
therapy, albeit a transmissible gene therapy. But the term "gene 
therapy" has fallen out of favor because of a handful of fatalities in 
clinical trials and, after nearly three decades of research, no gene 
therapy method has been proven to work consistently.

  So Arkin and Schaffer are instead calling the process "synthetic 
biology." Despite appearances, it's not an arbitrary term: The 
researchers are synthesizing biological elements into machines to do 
their bidding.

  "An artificial virus is one such product, since it is designed and 
constructed using molecular biology tools for a specific therapeutic 
application," Schaffer said. "As another example, Jay Keasling in our 
department engineers bacteria to produce small-molecule pharmaceutical 
drugs."

  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, MIT and other institutions have 
established departments and courses dedicated to this manipulation of 
human molecules.

  "All the capabilities are found in nature, just not in the right order 
to do what we want to do," Arkin said. "It's like changing the computer 
language. (Cells) perform amazing engineering feats under the control 
of complex cellular networks. We didn't design it, evolution did."

  Computer modeling is key to figuring out what bacteria or viruses 
might do in a given situation. The computer model Arkin and Schaffer 
used showed that their therapy won't likely eliminate all HIV cells in 
a patient. But if the treatment inhibits HIV too much, the good virus 
won't be able to propogate.

  "Maximal inhibition actually causes the therapy to extinguish itself," 
Schaffer said in an e-mail.

  Without the computer model to guide them, the researchers may not have 
detected such subtleties. However, other labs like Virxsys (researchers 
there published work that gave Arkin et al. a foundation for their own 
work) are further along in developing a similar therapy (although the 
Berkeley researchers' method is unique in its piggyback effect) without 
the benefit of a computer model. Scientists there are already testing 
their treatment for safety in humans, and hope to test for efficacy by 
the end of this year, said Boro Dropulic, the company's founder and 
chief scientific officer.

  Arkin and Schaffer's computer model will also help them foresee 
potential problems, which are plentiful when trying to treat a deadly 
disease with a manufactured virus. This is a virus that can be spread 
by having sex, just like HIV (although if it works, that could be a 
good thing). It's also possible that HIV and the therapeutic virus 
could mutate around each other and recombine to make an altogether new 
virus.

  "I can't say now it won't make it worse," Arkin said.