from Hacker News

How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

by jsomers on 11/2/20, 4:14 PM with 97 comments

  • by nahuel0x on 11/3/20, 1:41 AM

    This is mind blowing:

    > For the first half of the twentieth century, the going theory was that the invading element—the “antigen”—served as a template around which a corresponding antibody was molded. Only in 1955 did scientists discover the much stranger truth. It turned out that the cells that produce antibodies—called B cells, because they were first discovered in the bursa of Fabricius, an organ that does for birds what bone marrow does for humans—can produce only one kind each. Its structure is random, and nearly every B cell is discarded unused. If, however, an antibody created by a B cell happens to match some part of an antigen, that B cell will not just survive but clone itself. The clone incorporates many mutations, which offer the possibility of an even better match. After a few generations, an antibody with the best fit is “constructed” through a process of mini-evolution that occurs continuously in our lymph nodes and spleen. (Our ancestors the bony fish adapted the machinery of the B-cell system from an even more ancient parasite.)

    So, natural selection discovered a way to run an embedded natural selection search process in an individual. Talk about meta.

  • by dTal on 11/3/20, 12:50 AM

    I am blown away by this casually dropped metaphor:

    >As the virus spreads unchecked through the body, it drags a destructive immune reaction behind it. Individuals with COVID-19 face the same challenge as nations during the pandemic: if they can’t contain small sites of infection early—so that a targeted response can root them out—they end up mounting interventions so large that the shock inflicts its own damage.

  • by Entaroadun87 on 11/2/20, 10:09 PM

    Really like this analogy: It is a somewhat astonishing fact of life that the exact same DNA is shared by every cell in your body, from the skin to the brain; those cells differ in appearance and function because, in each of them, a molecular gizmo “transcribes” some DNA segments rather than others into molecules of single-stranded RNA. These bits of RNA are in turn used as the blueprints for proteins, the molecular machines that do most of a cell’s work. If DNA is your phone’s home screen, then transcription is like tapping an icon. By sampling the RNA present in a group of cells, researchers can see which programs those cells are running at that moment; by sampling it after the cells have been infected with a virus, they can see how that virus substitutes its own software.

  • by jostmey on 11/2/20, 10:06 PM

    Many paragraphs into the article and I still don’t know what important discovery or observation has been made

  • by aetherspawn on 11/3/20, 12:51 AM

    It would be interesting to see a heat map for reading an article like this.

    It’s so long.. after 10 minutes I wanted to know the point of it, so I skipped aggressively to the middle, found a few points, then skipped to the end.

    I wonder if there’s any value to so many words in this day and age with so many other things to read on the internet.

  • by flobosg on 11/3/20, 8:27 AM

    Another related mechanism is antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)[1], where suboptimal antibodies bind to the virus and cell receptors, promoting the former's entry into the latter. It has been proposed that ADE increases the severity of SARS-CoV-2 infections[2].

    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement

    [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5

  • by sarasasa28 on 11/3/20, 1:29 PM

    can we please stop using the word hack everywhere?

  • by BlueTemplar on 11/3/20, 11:49 AM

    Thankfully, we do have a (now scientifically proven !) working "cure" – though it mostly works at the onset of the first symptoms, when the virus is only starting to get a foothold in the body :

    https://hcqmeta.com/

    https://hcqtrial.com/