helpful viruses disusing the feasibility and other potential ideas that this could be used for

hey guys been a while
Just saw a video from a channel on youtube and wanted to discuss. I think this is really cool!
in the video the person developed a virus that would insert a plasmid containing a gene that makes a lactose enzyme to effectively cure his lactose intolerance. potentially this could be used for a number of intolerances.

Comments

  • here is a link incase you were interested
    https://youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY

  • yeah, that person is @chironex . That's my lab. He was my room mate at the time. Cool that you'e excited :) We've been tightening up that protocol and working on some other stuff too. Viral vectors are pretty standard tech if you have the hardware to grow them. Very useful.

  • ya looking at a way to do this without the need of viruses and think we found a solution. it'll be a slow burner though till we can test it. busy with other projects at the moment. Glad you liked the video! Got lots more hard core bio stuff coming up, primarily making spider silk grow in yeast amongst other bits and bobs

  • well I found it fascinating! love the videos, didn't realize you were the same people.

  • Yup! Got lots more bio videos coming up. Just waiting on stuff in the mail

  • Rad as. Do you think you could do a video on your protocol for growing/maintaining/storing viral vectors?

  • How did you guys @chironex and @glims get to use your lab so freely? Or is this something you guys put together with your own money?

    Human cell culture is notoriously difficult (not that bad in a professional lab) due to contamination especially when used to extract a viral load. Reading some recent papers it seems it takes a lot of cells to get even one therapeutic dose of viral gene therapy.

    When it comes to a non-viral load I would assume that lack of editing would be the main problem as there would be low efficiency if using transfection. Of course using transfection it's easy to get loads of plasmids and just shoot them in intramuscularly many times and use chemicals and electroporation (though I think electroporation and these chemicals would be less effective the deeper the tissue gets, probably limited mostly to skeletal muscle).

    Anyways I'm probably going to make a post soon about some stuff I'm reading about and collecting papers on in regards to targeted 'underground' (not approved by FDA) human edits.

  • Also @chironex how did the lactose edit go?

  • edited February 2019
    @RealityWizard get to use the lab so freely?... I had to re read that. I was so confused. That's my lab. And it took years of false starts and working other jobs, saving money, dealing with con investors...

    Mammalian cell culture is really simple, once you have the proper tools. Once you have a laminar flow hood life becomes pretty great. Then you grow them up in a 75cm flask and make sure you have a gene for selection in your vector, smack that baby in with some lipofectamine and boom.

    It's not underground. The lab is a 501c3 non profit. And you don't need FDA approval for research. Don't believe the hype dude. It's just lab work at the end of the day.
  • @Verta the vectors are a 3part BAC. I store them in the fridge/freezer/-80degC/liquid nitrogen, depending on what I'm using. In a tube.
  • @glims are you the one behind thought emporium?
  • That has been such an awesome resource! I've watched tons of your videos. Are you located in Canada?
  • @Moonman0922 no, no, that's @chrionex. He helped me set up a lab in the US and we did some projects together. He's back in Canada now with a new lab of his own.

  • Ya my new lab has taken me months to put together. Mine is based out of a larger community hackerspace and I managed to aquire one small corner to build the lab in. Whole room is 12' x 7'. Paid for everything out of pocket, which is also why I've been building a lot of my own tools to save on cash.

    As to the lactose thing, I just ate some goat cheese, does that answer your question?

    As Glims said, I was there to help him put his current lab together. That's why there's so much footage on my channel from that lab and my time down in crazy town (florida). And we still do projects together by shipping stuff back and forth. I wanted to stay longer but america has some trust issues and I'm a filthy canadian so had to make my way back to the more fun (and colder) side of the boarder.

  • @chironex Nice! I'm just across the border if you ever want to hang out and do some science!
  • @glims @chironex I see, that's really cool (both to the lactose and lab). Your lab @glims, you say it is a nonprofit, do you try to produce papers and apply for grants, or make products (including patents or novel pathways) or is this more of a 'fun' lab where you just research something interesting to you in a relatively non-scientific manner avoiding publications?

    I guess what I'm asking is what kind of research do you do? What is the lab work you're doing?

    Anyways lab work is not a problem for me, I currently work in a mammalian cell lab and will actually be changing the media on some human stem cells here in a second. My main concern was getting a laminar flow hood, something I thought would be rather expensive to buy outright. Also the total funding needs seems quite high. A 500ml bottle of the media my lab uses is about $300.

    When it comes to 'underground' edits, I do mean in live humans such as what chironex did with the lactose. Really I think it would be cool to offer gene delivery via AAV2 of virtually whatever someone wanted. Sure they'd have immune response and only so much can reasonably be changed and so on, but with enough virus load and doses you can likely get pretty good expression in muscle cells.

  • @RealityWizard "Research in a non scientific manner"? What does that even mean?
    I work in a lab. You can't do lab work without using the scientific method. Is it a fun lab? I guess so. I'm not a huge fan of how you delineate between projects. We do all of the options you outlined. That's kind of the point of having your own lab.

    We're a 501c3 non profit. We teach classes at local high schools, we have open lab work for people in the community, we'e trying to produce publishable work, but with an extremely small staff, it takes time, in between running the thing and all. We also would like to make money at some point because as you said, materials are expensive. However, I am stubbornly about open source biology work, so sometimes we pass up opportunities.

    Currently our lab projects are working on a live attenuated vaccine for HSV1, a tcell modification using the CCR5 hack, a modification to plants to make them grow twice as big twice as fast, and a variety of biomaterial projects (chitosan, nanocellulose, etc). We also have a backlog of a p53 edit, some flowers that turn blue in the presence of heavy metals in the soil, and a handful of other things on indefinite hold in the freezer till more people can work on them.

    Just to reiterate, what we do isn't "underground". Honestly, the term hacker should just be dropped imo. The lactose edit wasn't underground. It just wasn't industry funded.

    If you go home and make yourself a sandwich, are you an underground food-hacker, in your private kitchen doing food stuff in a relatively not cook-standard way?

    Do you see the analogy here? When I string together the terminology that you use to describe stuff and apply it to something you see as normal, it sounds weird.

  • @glims said:
    @RealityWizard
    Just to reiterate, what we do isn't "underground". Honestly, the term hacker should just be dropped imo. The lactose edit wasn't underground. It just wasn't industry funded.

    If you go home and make yourself a sandwich, are you an underground food-hacker, in your private kitchen doing food stuff in a relatively not cook-standard way?

    Do you see the analogy here? When I string together the terminology that you use to describe stuff and apply it to something you see as normal, it sounds weird.

  • @RealityWizard
    @glims said:
    Just to reiterate, what we do isn't "underground". Honestly, the term hacker should just be dropped imo. The lactose edit wasn't underground. It just wasn't industry funded.

    If you go home and make yourself a sandwich, are you an underground food-hacker, in your private kitchen doing food stuff in a relatively not cook-standard way?

    Do you see the analogy here? When I string together the terminology that you use to describe stuff and apply it to something you see as normal, it sounds weird.

    I agree, the term incites a black market and inexperienced connotation although it does not inherently mean either.

    @glims said:

    Currently our lab projects are working on a live attenuated vaccine for HSV1, a tcell modification using the CCR5 hack, a modification to plants to make them grow twice as big twice as fast, and a variety of biomaterial projects (chitosan, nanocellulose, etc). We also have a backlog of a p53 edit, some flowers that turn blue in the presence of heavy metals in the soil, and a handful of other things on indefinite hold in the freezer till more people can work on them.

    Do you have any public repositories of your data and publications that don't require searching my college's database?

    I came across this earlier while trying to make creating a persuasive essay:
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25757618

    And I am particularly interested in the modification causing plants to grow and what tissues, compounds, and proteins are ultimately affected by it. What plants has this been tested on and what is your educated guess on the theoretical limits of growth if the modified plant is put in an optimal environment and bred to increase the organisms viability throughout growth, maturation, and reproduction?

    Any further speculation is difficult without knowing the exact type of plant and a bit more about the methods and conditions in the procedure.

    My bad for the empty quote above this comment

  • *I came across this earlier while trying to make a persuasive essay:
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25757618

    Now I apologize for two unnecessary posts

  • @ThermalWinter Are you asking for the papers that we are using to back our projects? I can put those together and dump them into the dropbox. All the projects?

    As for the plant project, that is off topic for this thread. If you want to start another thread or pm me, I'm totally down to talk more about it. I've been slow cooking this project fo a while now, to get the most sound work possible. Also, plants be weird, so there have been weird setbacks. But yeah, let's chat.

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