[delinka]

"It appears to have few negative consequences..."

I invoke the law of unintended consequences. A fine example would be "so sorry it killed test subject 1337, apparently that particular genetic mutation in his DNA looked like a disease."

[colanderman]

Yes, I truly hope that these proteins do work as intended, but a part of me thinks "what about obscure virus X, which is capable of easily infecting most cells in a body but doesn't exhibit any negative effects on health?" If such a virus existed then these proteins, administered in significant enough amounts, would kill a person infected with virus X.

[curt]

Nah you would be given a dosage large enough just to kill the invading virus. It could hurt the person, but killing them is unlikely. Actually wrote a paper on a something similar I came up with back in undergrad using HIV.

[delinka]

I don't follow that logic. Sure, it stands to reason that if the drug can only kill infected cells, and the human hasn't already lost enough cells to kill them, then the drug won't kill the human.

But let's suppose that you can't measure in advance the number of cells that are infected, nor can the drug actually tell the difference between infected and not-infected cells (due to the aforementioned genetic abnormality.) What happens when the drug kills too many normal cells? The human dies.

[curt]

My point was that there are so many more healthy cells vs infected cells except on rare instances that even it kills healthy cells too they are far larger in number. Just like what happens during radiation treatments or any number of other treatments.

Still it would likely be a staged treatment that wouldn't kill the entirety of infected cells in a single dosage. The benefit is that you could see if there were adverse reacts before continuing.

[delinka]

Now that I think about it, it's much more like chemotherapy. Which does cause terrible side effects by affecting the entire body and not just cancer cells.

Radiation is targeted and not administered 'generally' like a drug would be. If you could aim drugs, chemotherapy would likely change drastically.