Possible cure for just about anything...

[FireNexus]

New vaccine provides instant immunity

New vaccine provides instant immunity

LA JOLLA, Calif., March 4 (UPI) -- A new type of vaccination could be used to provide instantaneous protection against viruses, bacteria, cancers and virulent toxins, U.S. researchers say.

The research team, led by Scripps Research Institute's Carlos Barbas III, tested the vaccination method -- covalent immunization -- on mice with either melanoma or colon cancer.

The scientists injected the mice with chemicals specifically designed to trigger a programmable and "universal" immune reaction. They developed other chemicals, "adapter" molecules," that recognized the specific cancer cells. Once injected into the animal, the adapter molecules self-assembled with the antibodies to create covalent antibody-adapter complexes, Barbas says.

"The antibodies in our vaccine
are designed to circulate inertly until they receive instructions from tailor-made small molecules to become active against a specific target," Barbas said in a statement.

"The advantage of this method is that it opens up the possibility of having antibodies primed and ready to go in the time it takes to receive an injection or swallow a pill."

The work is published in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

With any luck, this technique will actually pan out into something useful, if not the wondercure for everything the media will certainly blow this up into. Any thoughts from those smarter than I about how likely this is to do any good?

[Mr Bean]

Intial thoughts. We still have to have a vaccine for it. This wonder drug won't work if the ready to go does not know what to turn into. As a matter of fact the intial use for such a method escapes me besides cost concerns since it would be easier to simply vaccinate people then fill them full of "ready to vacinate" lego blocks that can be turned into a vacinee on demand. These "adapter" molucues seem to be the sticking point. How easy it is to make them? How good can we build them?

[Knife]

Sounds to me like they are developing an artificial acquired immune system. The 'adapter molecules' being anti bodies just waiting for the pill that gives them the 'antigen' they need to target the enemy. However, without more information, it is impossible to tell what it really does and what risks it will have. Off the top of my head though, autoimmune disease seems to be a real risk of this new system. What's to stop these 'adapter molecules' from seeing our own cells as bad and opsonizing them?

That's the problem with going after cancer, they are your cells just anaplastic. They have all the recognize self surface marker proteins that tell the WBC to leave em alone, though some are different enough to have marcrophages attack. Also, IIRC, the Tsupression cells get jacked up with rapid cell growth, further decreasing the effectiveness of the WBC's.

So, what''s to stop the real immune system in a person from attacking these things, or for T suppressor cells from acting upon them as they would with our natural acquired system? If it's close enough to our own system that our system won't attack it, then our own systems control loops should work on it thus making it less effective where these yahoo's want it to. If it's too different, then our own system will attack it.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

So, what''s to stop the real immune system in a person from attacking these things, or for T suppressor cells from acting upon them as they would with our natural acquired system? If it's close enough to our own system that our system won't attack it, then our own systems control loops should work on it thus making it less effective where these yahoo's want it to. If it's too different, then our own system will attack it.

This is the issue that has stopped widespread adoption of medicinal antibodies until very recently; foreign antibodies have foreign epitopes, so HAMAs lead to their destruction before they do anything (HAMA is 'Human anti-Mouse Antibody'; they used to use antibodies extracted from mice for this stuff). I imagine they'd use exactly the same solution that has been used for stuff like Herceptin; only the the CDRs are non human, the rest is all entirely human protein. Since it's the CDRs and the CDRs only that determine what antigen the antibody is specific to, that shouldn't produce any problem.

In fact, it's advantageous t do that, because the human antibody has the correct protein structures to interact with stuff like complement, cytotoxic T cells and NK cells, which non-human protein lacks.