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etiam | 6 months ago

Excellent point, and it seems plausible in my opinion.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10....

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etiam|6 months ago

Oh, and it's probably worthwhile pondering what the viruses will do if this mechanism comes into widespread use.

While I was looking for the reference above this also came up:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200210144854.h...

when bat cells quickly release interferon upon infection, other cells quickly wall themselves off. This drives viruses to faster reproduction

Quite a way from whole-animal physiology in the referenced research, by all means, but it's a fair point, right.

echelon|6 months ago

Even worse, that type of chronic inflammation might cause premature death. Or cancer. Or other disease states.

> “In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that if we could produce this type of light immune activation in other people, we could protect them from just about any virus,” Bogunovic says.

This sounds terrifying. There's a reason our bodies do not regulate like this.

0xDEAFBEAD|6 months ago

The article states:

>Bogunovic’s therapy is designed to mimic what happens in people with ISG15 deficiency, but only for a short time.

Given the choice between 2 weeks of a moderate COVID infection (fever but no hospitalization), and 2 weeks of this therapy, I would guess that the moderate COVID infection gets you at least 10x the inflammation.

layla5alive|6 months ago

Yeah, constant low-grade inflammation is a hallmark of auto-immune disease, diabetes, etc. It's a glide path to degeneration and death.

thehappypm|6 months ago

But if this was something you could activate as needed..

zahlman|6 months ago

It also sounds like an episode of some televised sci-fi series where someone was exhibiting remarkable immunity to all sorts of diseases (including some nasty ones deliberately added for testing); but it turned out that this was no super-cure but instead the limited natural resources of the immune system being used up all at once, leading to a horrific death when they ran out.

I can't remember which series it was, though.