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Breakthrough in research makes HIV visible within white blood cells, paving the way to fully clear it from the body (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[-] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago

Nice, finally we found a cure for that shit

I wonder how pharma is gonna monetize it, or if its open source

[-] [email protected] 43 points 1 week ago

Not to dampen your enthusiasm, but they only showed it works in vitro, so basically in a petri dish. Which means there's still animal tests and human tests coming (if the animal tests are promising) and that's were most of the cures fail. Because a mouse is wildly different from a Petri dish and a human is wildly different from a mouse.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

https://xkcd.com/1217/

[+] [email protected] -9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

the researchers have shown for the first time that mRNA can be delivered into the cells where HIV is hiding, by encasing it in a tiny, specially formulated fat bubble. The mRNA then instructs the cells to reveal the virus.

Am I the only one kinda scared about mRNA treatments?

I have always wondered how a zombie apocalypse could come about, like, from a biochemical perspective, and mRNA seems to me a very good candidate.

Obviously it has a massive potential to cure otherwise incurable diseases, like genetic defects...

Edit: Sheesh thanks for the downvotes, teaches me to ask a question on Lemmy.

[-] [email protected] 43 points 1 week ago

No you're not the only one, lots of uninformed people are scared.

If you are aware of a specific mechanism that this kind of treatment can go poorly, then you are free to share the studies or the research that supports it.

But just being scared of new things isn't beneficial. There are whole communities that are keeping diseases alive because they don't trust science.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

You know what cracks me up? That there's a rather high likelihood that I know more about mRNA that you do. Ignorance is bliss I suppose.

If you are aware of a specific mechanism that this kind of treatment can go poorly

Alright, so here's one a concern.
As you're certainly aware, there are studies that have found that viral RNA can carry into the host's nucleus and be reverse-transcribed into the infected cell's genome (for your convenience, here's one such finding for SARS-CoV-2 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105968118), and that it produces chimeric transcripts that fuse the viral and host sequences.
Can you address how an mRNA vaccine would be able to ensure that such reverse transcription would not occur?

Here's another concern.
The Pfizer BNT162b2 COVID vaccine is, of course, a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) mRNA vaccine, which is basically the approach discussed in the OP article. This article (Curr. Issues Mol. Biol. 2022, 44(3), 1115-1126) found that BNT162b2 mRNA is reverse transcribed intracellularly into DNA in as fast as 6 h upon BNT162b2 exposure. Not only that, it has also found increased nuclear expression and distribution of LINE-1, an endogenous reverse transcriptase.
Since we previously covered the integration of foreign RNA into the host's DNA, can you please explain how do you propose to identify and control for possible epigenetic effects of mRNA vaccines?

Seems like people found my zombie apocalypse parallel a bit too farfetched, but cancerous growth and tumors are in essence breakdowns of the genetic machinary in our cells, which mRNA vaccines are just too happy to mess with. All I'm advocating is more research, better understanding, and safety.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

It's okay to be scared of new advances in medicine. But it's also important that you tamper that fear against medical and scientific evidence.

mRNA has been in research for years, well beyond the covid vaccine. Understanding how and why it works is important to understand its safety.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The payload of many viruses is RNA very similar to mRNA and injecting it into cells is how they reproduce.

Given how frequent are mutations in viruses, if there was to be a zombie apocalypse, natural selection would have done it by now.

Some kind of deadly pandemic is more likely to happen due to mRNA manipulation (and it would have to be on purpose, as the mRNA would need to come with instruction to reproduce in a way that lets it travel from cell to cell, i.e. de facto be an RNA virus which hardly happens by chance) than one which produces zombies.

[-] [email protected] -4 points 1 week ago

No, the scientist who just discovered this is going to die horribly and somehow his notes will all disappear. No one will know how it happened, and they will investigate for 6 months, or until everyone forgets, and find no further leads.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Duck off (lol, good autocorrect for once)

This is a sub for positive news, so say something like „Sure it will be OSS“ or something

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Per the article the technology can be applied to cancer too a bigger "buisness".

It can be advantageous for a buisness to develop these since it would basically undercut all other providers. If you make a drug that can totally cure a disease while your competitors only make on that treat it you've all but garunteed you will control the entire market.

I hate thinking of public health in these terms, but there are incentives to these advancements for companies

[-] [email protected] -5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

i can haz unprotected sex with multiple strangers now?

this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025

335 points (99.1% liked)

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