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by subrat_rout
1953 days ago
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I completely agree with fabian2k. It's incredibly risky to throw all random sequences peptides into the blood stream for evoking immune response. What happens if a sub-sequence of peptide matches with one of our own's body proteins and our immune system starts building antibody against it? That's what happens in most of autoimmune disease. In addition, most of the peptides that can be synthesized from a protein structures are sequential epitopes. To ELI5, imagine a string with beads that starts with A-Z letters and we take a smaller sequence A-B-C-D or B-C-D-E and throw to system to build antibody against it. Yes, the immune system can make antibodies against it. But in real life, most of the protective or virus neutralizing antibodies comes from conformational epitopes. Imagine when the protein gets folded to its natural form then the beads with letter sequences are just jumbled sequences and finding a conformational epitope is key to raise neutralizing antibodies. That is only possible when a protein's structure is fully understood using x-ray crystallography. The article does not disclose how the author was able to get those sequences and how he was sure about its efficacy. However, the author's bold step towards the experiment is praiseworthy. But extreme caution is needs to be taken as self administering an untested drug or vaccine may fall within the boundary of law and it can invoke regulatory actions against him. |
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The peptide sequences are listed on the whitepaper, so it’s a matter of BLASTing[1] them against the human proteome to check for possible matches. I just did it and there doesn’t seem to be any statistically significant hit.
[1]: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi