Report from the 'Hot Zone': Researchers Create a "Safe" Ebola
How would you like to work on a disease that makes you bleed from the eyes, mouth and rear, causes organ damage and leads to systemic necrosis (i.e. bits of your body die before you do)? What if we added the fact that there's no cure, and if you catch it your bosses will say "Oh my god that's terrible, lie here while we study you really hard"?
You're not alone. One of the major hurdles in studying Ebola viruses is a shortage of the high security biology labs needed to handle it, the extremely brave scientists to staff them , and (presumably) the specially treated lab coats which can contain their rugged dashing manli/womanliness while still projecting an air of scientific professionalism . This is why Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been using one of the rare Biosafety Level 4 labs (translation: even a spoon from that place could kill you and everyone you know), not to try and cure the rapacious ribovirus directly, but to make it possible for more people to work on it.
"Safe Ebola" might be a phrase right up there with "Responsible Hoollywood Parent" and "Realistic Jedi" but that's what the team have made. By crippling the virus they have created a tamed Ebola strain only able to survive in special cells engineered to provide a protein the damaged disease now lacks. This was achieved by punching out one of the virus strands vital genes, replacing it with a dummy marker - thereby converting one of the most terrifying plagues to scar modern man into the pathogen equivalent of an extremely old man on a dialysis machine. If it tries to move too far to recreate its youthful party days, infecting and spreading like there's no tomorrow, it falls right on its face in the microscopic equivalent of slipping on a banana peel.
This cute and cuddlified Ebola strain can be worked on in Biosafety level 3 (a spoon from that place could kill you, but probably only you, and only if untreated) or even level 2 (the spoon would just make you really wish you'd never used it). The huge increase in manpower this would lead to could massively accelerate progress towards an Ebola cure.
The creators do not believe there is significant risk of the virus mutating back into a lethal form in such a lab (though movies have taught us that lethal agents mutate faster than an X-man in a radiation chamber), more concerned with the threat of people reversing the modification and creating a biological horror again. For this reason they only plan to release the crippled RNA virus to other labs (a virus only has a single strand of proteins), while the full double-helixed DNA used to make it is kept securely under lock and key next to the real ebola virus - which is about as powerful an anti-theft deterrent as you can get.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
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Source: Disarming the deadly virus http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080121181417.html
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