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Fake virus could make safe new vaccines 6-27-08
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A "wimpy" artificial virus protected mice against
polio, and the approach might be used to make a range of safer new vaccines
against viruses, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.
The team at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, had created the first
artificial virus, a synthetic version of polio, in 2002.
Reporting in the journal Science, they said they used it to vaccinate mice, and
then infected the mice with what should have been a deadly dose of polio. The
mice survived.
"Ultimately we created a wimpy poliovirus that can be customized and does not
cause disease unless given at high doses," Bruce Futcher, a professor of
molecular genetics and microbiology who worked on the study.
"These viruses are still far from suitable vaccines for humans, but there is a
lot of potential for this approach," he added in a statement.
The researchers used a unique method to make their virus, relying on a built-in
redundancy in DNA, the material that carries genetic instructions in organisms.
DNA's code is written using just four nucleic acids, represented by the letters
A, C, T and G. These are combined in various ways to make amino acids, which in
turn make proteins.
It is possible to make an amino acid with more than one combination of these
letters -- for example, GCC and GCG both code for the amino acid alanine. For
unknown reasons, organisms favor certain combinations.
SAFER VACCINES?
Futcher's team made their polio virus using the less-favored combinations of the
virus's genetic code.
They hoped these would stimulate the immune system in the same way as
"wild-type" polio, without causing disease, and that is what appears to have
happened, they wrote.
Each difference in the genetic code weakened the virus in a different way.
"This 'death by a thousand cuts' strategy could be generally applicable to
attenuating many kinds of viruses," they wrote.
"Even for an inactivated rather than live virus approach, these features would
allow a vaccine to be made from a safer starting material than the corresponding
wild-type virus."
Polio vaccines have virtually eradicated the disease in most countries. But an
oral vaccine that uses a weakened version of a live polio virus can sometimes
get back into the water supply and mutate into a form that can infect people.
Doctors have been looking for a safer yet effective polio vaccine that is as
easy to administer as the drops. Dr. Jonas Salk's original polio vaccine, which
effectively rid the United States of the feared virus in the 1950s and 1960s,
used a "killed" polio virus but had to be injected.
The letter-by-letter changes needed the help of a powerful computer, said
computer science professor Steven Skiena, who worked on the project
"Sophisticated computer algorithms are necessary to design the hundreds of
changes to sufficiently cripple the virus for our 'death by a thousand cuts'
approach," Skiena said in a statement.
"Because of the large number of changes, the weakened virus can never mutate
back to wild-type."
Comment:
Anybody who reads this news site knows how I feel about vaccinations; but this just goes to far! If you have not seen the recent movie I Am Legend with Will Smith, you need to! Because this scenario becomes all to real when monkeying around with vaccines causes all but 12 percent of the world population to become mutated and rabid-like. We were not made to, nor ever intended to play God.
It is highly questionable how a synthetically produced vaccine could cause any correct immune response in the body. We get immune to an illness by getting it, creating antibodies and beating it. This process than leads to lifelong immunity. How can a different genetically engineered virus cause immunity?
It also becomes scary to realize that science has gone so far that they could genetically engineer any illness they want, even ones worse than we have seen or even imagined.