I'm so impressed you did it! Here are my favorite parts, and my future questions at the end. I was holding off on giving you more questions!
Rrrr NOTE: Too sick to go in person, I spoke to Dr. Coffin via phone on May 14. 2010, for half an hour.
he's open to email questions!
With Brigitte Huber (who is currently doing a study on genetics and Mono and CFS), they are collaborating on xmrv in human virus. ** Xmrv is so close to the viruses that they find in mice .... They are working on nailing this down; that it really is in human dna that they are seeing XMRV.
** In Fredrick (the NCI), they are developing extremely sensitive assays in plasma and in PBMCs (white blood cells). They are not looking elsewhere in the body at the moment. Yes, they want to look in lymph nodes and guts [the two places the interviewer asked about, offering her own body for biopsying], but they'll do that later. Not quite so simple to do this in terms of the paper work.
A. ** How do you know if XMRV is the cause of CFS? If you treat the infection, and if you thus address the symptoms, then you know. Though others in his field may not agree the time is right, he would like to see a controlled clinical trial with antiretrovirals now: if they work to treat the symptoms, then we are on to something. When I asked how do we get a doctor on board without a paper confirming/replicating the link between XMRV and CFS, he said that this is the problem, can you get a controlled clinical trial before that association is confirmed? He said that is hard, but that he would like to see such a trial now, without more waiting.
A. ** He thinks they have a good test now [interviewer got the impression that he means they just got it recently]. It will be a good way to assess the risk to the [nation's] blood supply. The test will be available very quickly. Abbott laboratories is working on this. They were part of the HIV tests at the start. And this will become part of the screening of the blood supply. The best test will be an antibody test, as that is easier. [I was not sure if he meant that this Abbott test is an antibody test or not?]
Q. How exact do you have to be with your PCR primers to pick up a different strain or a different serotype of XMRV.
A. ** This is an area a lot of people are working on now, at Tufts, at the FDA. What is the genetic diversity of the findings We may have been mislead for one reason or another from the original study. WPI has to do an assay that would not see the mouse dna.
A. ** He thinks we'll know in a few months if there is a link between xmrv and cfs. The group doing this work is the protein expression lab at NCI. This is not the Ruscettis' doing this work.
A. ** His hope would be that someone would set up a good controlled trial. Without doing a good placebo controlled trial, we can't move forward. ... We need to lobby for a controlled trial to be set up. It would not be a bad idea to do this, though others in his field would not agree.
FUTURE QUESTIONS:
***What does it take to get a good trial to duplicate Science results which amplifies the low viral count? Does anyone have the money to do it?
Does he think XMRV is likely to have neurotoxins in the envelope?
Does the reference to mouse dna mean they need isolate and create a test that reacts only to the part of the XMRV dna that is different from the mulv virus?
They say that lab mice cannot transmit the virus. Is anyone testing wild mice and ticks?