serendipity vs evolution
When penicillin was discovered by accident, could they at least have had the courtesy to also discover a miracle antiviral compound at the same time? On day 6 here of an extremely annoying cold and wondering why nobody has addressed this yet.
On the subject of a completely different virus, I heard a talk about corporate drug development to combat HIV and I had to share. In our own cells, our body goes to a lot of lengths to make accurate copies of our DNA for cell division. But in HIV it's a completely different story. HIV carries around its genetic information as a single stranded RNA molecule. When HIV attaches to and invades a CD4 cell (unfortunately CD4 cells are part of our immune system) the first order of business is to make a DNA copy of the HIV's RNA. This process is called reverse transcription. In HIV, this process is highly error prone. HIV intentionally makes a lousy DNA copy of its RNA. Why? It means that HIV mutates at an incredibly fast rate. In fact, so fast that it is morally unethical to treat a patient with any single drug since it is guaranteed that a mutant HIV strain will arise very quickly in the patient with resistance to this drug. To combat the high rate of mutations that HIV undergoes, modern treatments uses multiple drugs simultaneously, putting HIV in an evolutionary conundrum where it needs an exquisitely improbable set of simultaneous mutations to have any chance of adaptation. In quite a number of patients, this is extremely successful in suppressing the virus over long times.
Despite this, it does seem to still adapt, but much, much more slowly. So what do they do? I know drug companies take a tough rap sometimes, but I have to tell you this is amazing. They try to anticipate and profile the mutant HIV that successfully evade one cocktail of drugs and develop new drugs to attack that mutant and so on. Some hold out hope that a 'magic combination' of drugs can one day be developed to which there is no possible evolutionary trap door escape for HIV. As Jeff Goldblum's character cautioned in 'Jurassic Park', will we be humbled since "nature finds a way"? That the possibility of cornering HIV is even on table gives some hope I think, as it would have been unthinkable 10-15 years ago.