Retrovirology Publishes Five Papers on XMRV and Contamination

[SOC]

It's on this forum too

Thanks, Cloud! I'll go find (and sign) it.

 

[shannah]

I'm not a Face Booker. Does anyone know of one elsewhere?

I'll pass this FB petition on, though.

Here's a link I just happened to find sickofcfs - same petition just not on FB:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/264/...wnormalwview-wzoom0wzoom-wpunctuationkerning/

 

[Cort]

KDM Statement On Recent Publications Prof. Kenny De Meirleirs uttalelse om de 5 publiserte kontaminerings-studiene:

“The contamination by mouse material was excluded in our study, that of Lo and that of Lombardi et al. We are not using PCR as a basis of the test but human prostate cancer cells that do not express RNase L so the virus from patient’s blood can grow in it. We also sequence the virus and I can assure you it is not mouse material.
Governments and insurance companies are horrified by the idea that there is a new retrovirus out there that has infected 10 times more people than HIV up to date. My preliminary data show that the virus does not grow in culture anymore after Nexavir + GcMAF although the procedure was identical to the pretreatment culture.
In the next months more will come from our side. A study with healthy blood donors, ME patients who got ill immediately after blood transfusion and ME patients who gave blood after they got ill will be published in the first half of 2011.

What these 5 are doing to the patients is a crime against humanity.

Kenny De Meirleir”

http://merutt.wordpress.com/

I know that is what many people want to hear but to state that these researchers including Dr. Coffin and the guy who wrote the editorial - who both have said these papers raise concerns but do not definitively state anything about the WPI study - are creating crimes against humanity...

Now he's indirectly suggesting that the researchers are the pawns of insurance companies.....

As someone who was the victim of a smear campaign by a patient support group he should know better.

 

[Carryon]

Quote Originally Posted by Marty View Post
Finally a level-headed comment to today's news, aruschima; thank you. You are spot on; our job is not to try to judge an extremely complicated science that very bright people have spent their lives immersed in. Those who have no scientific background, do not feel bad at all. Our job continues to be to advocate for the validity of our disease, with or without XMRV. Even if this were the discovery that we have waited for, and probably many things will change before that ever happens years from now, then there is yet another fight to be fought: getting the physicians and the public to believe, after all these years of calling us lazy and crazy. It is hugely complicated science and even more difficult, it is hard-to-understand politics and human nature. OK, be excited when the news goes our way, but don't be distracted from your job, and don't be discouraged if the news doesn't go your way. I too am glad to see today's papers published; they provide a concrete target for rebuttal. That's the scientific way; state your case and defend it, back and forth, back and forth.

It is fair game as an advocate to criticize poor reporting, though. Not because they don't support our hoped-for view, but because they have presented a carelessly researched report.

If we are really lucky, this will go on for a long, long time, years. Don't sit around waiting; continue your advocacy for validation, not for XMRV.

Love to agree with you Marty

Me too... In advocacy, you can not get to high or to low... just keep working

 

[Cloud]

Thanks, Cloud! I'll go find (and sign) it.

Sorry, I had to look too...there it is.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/264/...wnormalwview-wzoom0wzoom-wpunctuationkerning/

 

[urbantravels]

Sigh. The way the press handles science news is usually pretty dopey, but this feels like some kind of new low. "Study concludes..." "Study has demonstrated..." "Study proves...."

No wonder the general public seems to conclude "Ah, those experts don't know nuthin" when the back-and-forth of science gets reported this way. Seems there are very few reporters out there with the knowledge and motivation to ask, "Does this study really demonstrate or 'prove' anything?"

 

[Carryon]

Mikovits response...

http://www.facebook.com/#!/notes/andrea-whittemore/dr-mikovits-responds/495512512528

 

[Marty]

Thank you Carryon; you know we have been dying to hear from her. Please post it here for those who are not on FaceBook. I tried the link but "content is not available" was displayed.

 

[Cloud]

Mikovits response...

http://www.facebook.com/#!/notes/andrea-whittemore/dr-mikovits-responds/495512512528

It won't load....do you have a copy?

 

[Nielk]

I asked Dr. Derek Enlander about his opinion about these 5 articles and this was his response:

"yes I saw it
It makes no sense that people are having a boxing match
a SPLIT SAMPLE replication study is needed"

I am not sure what he means but maybe someone else here does.

 

[Carryon]

Dr. Mikovits Responds
by Andrea Whittemore on Monday, December 20, 2010 at 8:38pm

The Lombardi et al. and Lo et al. studies were done using four different methods of detection. They were not simply PCR experiments, as were the studies by McClure et al. and others who have recently reported their difficulties with contamination. Experienced researchers such as Mikovits, Lombardi, Lo and their collaborators understand the limitations of PCR technology, especially the possibility of sample contamination. As a result, we and Lo et al. conducted rigorous studies to prevent and rule out any possibility that the results reported were from contamination.

In addition to the use of PCR methodology, the Lombardi team used two other scientific techniques to determine whether, in fact, we had found new retroviruses in human blood samples. We identified a human antibody response to a gamma retroviral infection and we demonstrated that live gamma retrovirus isolated from human blood could infect human cells in culture. These scientific findings cannot be explained by contamination with mouse cells, mouse DNA or XMRV-related virus-contaminated human tumor cells. No mouse cell lines and none of the human cell lines reported today by Hue et al. to contain XMRV were ever cultured in the WPI lab where our PCR experiments were performed.

Humans cannot make antibodies to viruses related to murine leukemia viruses unless they have been exposed to virus proteins. Therefore, recent publications regarding PCR contamination do not change the conclusions of the Lombardi et al. and Lo et al. studies that concluded that patients with ME/CFS are infected with human gammaretroviruses. We have never claimed that CFS was caused by XMRV, only that CFS patients possess antibodies to XMRV related proteins and harbor infectious XMRV, which integrates into human chromosomes and thus is a human infection of as yet unknown pathogenic potential "The coauthors stand by the conclusions of Lombardi et al. Nothing that has been published to date refutes our data."

Judy A. Mikovits

 

[Cloud]

Exactly what I thought. Thanks Carryon.

 

[urbantravels]

Excellent. If this has not been put out as a press release, they should do so IMMEDIATELY. Since, as we have seen, many news outlets happily just reprint press releases instead of doing reporting...might as well give them some new fodder besides Wellcome's "conclusions."

 

[roma]

facebook link

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Whitt...note.php?note_id=474146143025&id=154801179671

 

[Sean]

...

These papers are probably not truly bad for us -- it's always good to know where the pitfalls are. What really upsets me is the BBC article that seems to extrapolate WAY beyond the data in the papers. What kind of journalism is that?

What is it with the UK and ME/CFS? This is getting far beyond ridiculous. Did we ever figure out what's the deal with all those "secret" ME documents? I'm not generally prone to conspiracy theories, but the determination to crush the idea that ME/CFS is a physical illness borders on the absurd.

Spilling over into obsessional psychosis at times, it seems to me. It's really weird.

And I agree with your overall take on these papers. As somebody who greatly respects and values careful, rigourous science, I have no issue with any problems and limitations in any research being pointed out. Quite the contrary, I welcome it as a necessary and productive step in the process of better understanding, provided it is done accurately and fairly, and in a basically civil manner.

As I have said before, I don't care if XMRV is The Answer, I just want to know if it is or isn't. If it is, then we can start figuring out how to treat it. If it isn't, then we can more productively re-direct our efforts and resources to figuring out what is the problem.

 

[alex3619]

And i also don't see how an endogenous mouse retrovirus could infect monkeys. Or could it?

But i'm no scientist and don't really understand these things, so i think it does not make a lot of sense for me to speculate.

Hi eric_s, the infection of monkeys strongly implies it can infect us, and we know this is true for human tissue, it just remains to be proved for whole people. These contamination claims are basically forced to acknowledge that XMRV is a real virus, and really in human cells - they just want to claim that there is no evidence it is in CFS, or anything else they can get away with saying it is not associated with. I have more to say, I had a whole long post I tried to send last night, but my phone exchange died and it was only just repaired a short while ago. Bye, Alex

 

[lancelot]

British bastards can't accept the truth~!

 

[August59]

All of these papers were not just about PCR

I know there are some that are keeping the middle road and have stated that these papers were about PCR and its inability to rule out contamination, but headlines that are worded as follows were completely unprofessional and pretty much hits on being completely ignorant.

Press Release: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.


For immediate release Monday 20 December 2010

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is not caused by XMRV
New research shows XMRV virus is a lab contaminant

 

[Cort]

British bastards can't accept the truth~!

Tell us what you really think Lancelot!
​

Its good to have the statements from the WPI quickly and good to hear from Dr. Lipkin....

I thought this statement was interesting:

We have never claimed that CFS was caused by XMRV, only that CFS patients possess antibodies to XMRV related proteins and harbor infectious XMRV, which integrates into human chromosomes

Isn't that integration finding one of the biggies? A retrovirus can only integrate into human chromosomes if it infects a cell; ie is an infectious retrovirus - not a contaminant. . One of the researchers said he couldn't explain how XMRV integrated itself into prostate cells if it was a contaminant...Now Dr. Mikovits is stating XMRV is integrated into the human chromosomes of people with CFS....I wasn't clear if they had shown this or not.

However you can have a virus that is a contaminant....Mouse DNA is not the only contaminant...you can have a virus that gets into a sample and I assume inserts itself into the cells in that sample (???) There's still alot to learn

 

[Snow Leopard]

The Oakes et al. paper has some interesting discussion:

In contrast to the qPCR results, we were able to readily detect XMRV using the nested PCR originally described by Urisman et al. [1], and we found many more positive samples in our healthy control cohort, compared to the CFS cohort. Of possible relevance for the interpretation of these findings may be the fact that
the samples from the two cohorts were prepared years apart, although all in the same laboratory using somewhat different protocols and reagents. It is also important to point out that individual DNA samples remained reproducibly positive or negative on repeat examination rendering the possibility of random contamination of the PCR assays very unlikely. Furthermore, each assay contained positive and negative
controls which were 100% correlative; i.e., the DNA from the XMRV-infected cell line was always positive and the no-template control or LnCaP DNA was always negative. Thus, it is unlikely that contamination occurred at the time of setting up the PCR reactions.

Note that the above explicitly diasagrees with Sato et al. who claims that the contamination is due to the RT kit and the Taq primers from Invitrogen.


Also:

while >50% of XMRV/MLV-negative samples were positive for mouse DNA

That was using the IAP assay.

And:

To date, we have not been able to pinpoint a specific reagent or laboratory vessel for being consistently positive for mouse DNA, but preliminary experiments implicate both fetal calf serum (FCS) and phosphate buffered saline (PBS), although large variations in the surmised amount of contaminating mouse DNA were observed from bottle to bottle. All blood samples were collected in heparin tubes rendering the anti-coagulant also a likely suspect for mouse DNA contamination. However, a comparison of parallel blood collections from the same healthy individual in heparin, Na–citrate and EDTA tubes did not support this hypothesis.

I'm sorry, but people's immune system cannot respond to a lab contamination...

There are different ways of doing serology. If you culture the virus in a human cell line, then the virus could re-combine with foreign protein fragments that elicit an antibody response.

Two points I'm taking to bed with me (call me hopeful)
Seems obvious the release all at once was designed to create as much damage as possible, to win a argument, as if the argument is more important than the truth, or the science.

It seems to be a counterpoint to red-cross banning CFS donors in the USA and perhaps the infamous advertisement.