John Coffin on lessons learned from HIV

Dr. John Coffins on a question whether there have been lessons from the handling of HIV in the eighties:

Back in June when we first began to just hear rumors really of these studies that were coming out, one of them the prostate cancer study that was presented in a meeting in May, and then this other was beginning to bubble up a little bit, but the papers were still under review at that time. The first thing we did – I'm putting my NCI hat on for the moment – was to organize a meeting in which (which unfortunatly couldn't be public, because of the nature of the unpublished data) in which we brought everybody that we knew of that was working in the XMRV area or might just be interested in it, together for a small meeting at NCI, to discuss exactly these issues, to make sure that we would not go down that road that has have gone down with HIV, as you say to the considerable detriment of the overall research effort.

Dr. John Coffin at minute 164 of CFSAC - Day 1 (October 29, 2009)

John Coffin on inter-XMRV genetic relationship

One of the most very striking things is the very close relationship (in the viruses genetic makeup from person-to-person), and Dr Peterson showed you this and I’ve also got that on the slide in a minute, of how close these viruses are to one another. And the most distant pair actually, both of which were from prostate cancer, differs by only 0.3%. Now a patient who's been infected with HIV for one or two weeks has a greater diversity in his virus population than does virus isolated in different years, different parts of the country, different diseases of this virus.

It’s really remarkable how close that is and that’s a very important implication. It’s not that this virus has a lower mutation rate than HIV. These viruses probably have all about the same mutation rate. But its suggestive in fact that there are very few cycles of replication that separate the viruses that’s in one person from the virus that’s in another.

Dr. John Coffin at Minute 133 of CFSAC - Day 1 (October 29, 2009)

Please notice that Dr. Coffin still operates under the assumption that Dr. Judy Mikovits has found a human pathogen – he tries to explain away some of the question such a very close relationship poses.

John Coffin on XMRV in cell lines

For all the people who think John Coffin was part of some sort of cover-up, that is what he had to say in October 2009 about this:

The virus that you isolate is infectious for a number of human cell lines. It’s particularly infectious for the prostate cancer cell lines as was mentioned and also for b-cell and t-cell derived lines and for fresh activated PBMCs (Peripheral Blood Mononuclear cells) which are basically a mixture of b-cells and t-cells.

Dr. John Coffin at minute 130 of CFSAC - Day 1 (October 29, 2009)

Later, at minute 137:

One of the big worries in this kind of study over the years is these viruses are actually common contaminants of human cell lines. They infect prostate cancer cell lines very nicely, and these are often isolated by passage through nude mice. Once the nude mice have this infectious provirus, this virus can then infect the tumor. There are repeated reports over and over again of human tumor cell lines that have picked up these viruses in this way and so when one first sees this it’s a major concern.

And BTW, that XMRV can infect a cell line is no proof that XMRV is a human pathogen.

John Coffin on getting live XMRV virus out of plasma

[The WPI] can get live virus out of PBMCs or even out of plasma which is actually pretty remarkable. It’s in fact quite hard to isolate live virus from plasma of HIV infected patients. It tends to be coated with antibody, virions aren’t in very good shape and so on. It almost looks like it’s easier to do that with CFS (although the virologists who are actually working on this may not like the characterization of being easy).

Dr. John Coffin at Minute 129 of CFSAC - Day 1 (October 29, 2009)