Chapter 1077 Turning Point
After Professor Chang's rabies virus was completely eliminated, he was transferred from the ICU to the general ward for rehabilitation treatment.
He now has no other sequelae except bilateral lower limb dystonia, and the treatment was very successful. Regarding the treatment of rabies, Yang Ping did not have time to summarize, so he handed over the summary of this new method to the Department of Infectious Diseases and ICU of Nandu Affiliated One. This can be regarded as a small gift to his father-in-law.
The Department of Infectious Diseases and ICU of the First Affiliated Hospital of Nandu City can definitely use this new method to set up a topic and then conduct further research. Currently, this method only has successful cases, but regardless of the multi-sample success rate in the future, it has achieved zero breakthroughs.
Sisi returned to Sanbo Hospital for K-virus treatment shortly after being discharged from the hospital. Now she needs to be treated every four weeks, that is, one treatment, with an interval of three weeks, and each treatment requires a week of hospitalization. For Sisi, she has become accustomed to switching between hospital and school. Compared with before, this switching seems easier and more regular now, and every treatment brings more hope.
The treatment of K virus has formed a set of standard procedures, and this time it will be carried out in full accordance with the standard procedure: injection of K virus, then immediately after injection, 6 hours later, 12 hours later, 24 hours later, 48 hours later, 72 Hours later... blood samples were taken for virus concentration testing. On the third and seventh days, local punctures were made twice to obtain tumor biopsies for cytological examination.
Everyone is not as nervous and worried as before during the experiment. The current K virus has mutated many times and has minimal impact on the human body. Apart from low-grade fever for three to five days, there will be no other more serious adverse reactions. In addition to drinking more water Other than monitoring body temperature, no medical intervention is required.
More than twelve hours after the blood was drawn, Yang Ping had not received a call from Professor Zhang Zhiwei. In normal experiments, he usually received the first data report from Professor Zhang about three hours after the blood was drawn. Why didn't he respond for so long this time? Yang Ping checked his mobile phone and found that there was no payment arrears and the network was normal.
There may be some difficulties in the experiment, such as bugs in the image recognition software. As a newly launched software, it needs to be continuously upgraded and improved. It is not surprising that sometimes there are bugs. Yang Ping continues to wait patiently for the data.
While waiting, he continued to think about what to do next, and also analyzed the current development directions of cancer treatment in the world as a whole, trying to find some valuable new clues.
Professor Zhang Zhiwei called, and his tone was more anxious: "Professor Yang, is there something wrong with the specimen this time? How come not a single tumor cell infected by the K virus was found?"
"Not one?" Yang Ping wanted to confirm again.
For a rigorous scientific researcher, any doubt must not be dismissed lightly. Any abnormality that appears, you must first treat it as existing, and then think about it seriously.
When a gastroenterology expert from a domestic university was studying for a doctorate, he ultimately missed the Nobel Prize because he rashly denied the abnormalities that appeared in the experiment. He was studying the pathogenesis of gastric cancer during his doctoral studies. Once he found a bacteria that he had never seen before in the gastric juice of a patient, so he told his tutor about this situation. The tutor smiled and said: "You are stupid, the human digestive system It is an open pipe structure. Food and water must be taken in from the outside every day. Food and water must be taken in from the outside every day. There are a lot of bacteria in the water, so isn’t it normal to have bacteria in the stomach? The intestines are also the bacterial reservoir of the human body, where countless types of bacteria gather.” After hearing this, the doctor lowered his head in shame and thought that the instructor was right. I was so naive that I thought I had discovered some major new information, but it turned out to be this. Later, an Australian doctor also discovered this bacterium from the stomach. He did not deny this abnormality easily. Instead, he kept researching and extracted the bacteria for various analyses. Finally, he found that this bacterium was Helicobacter pylori, which is closely related to gastric cancer. Because of this result, this doctor and another co-research colleague later won the Nobel Prize.
This phenomenon is very strange. It was fine some time ago, and the experiments were more successful every time. Why did this happen suddenly this time?
"I initially thought there was a problem with the image recognition software, but all our researchers used manual methods to read many pictures, and the results were the same. Not a single tumor cell was infected, let alone the K virus that initiated the apoptosis process." Professor Zhang Zhiwei said. The more excited he gets.
Yang Ping immediately said: "We need to do two aspects of analysis. One is that this is a fact, and the other is that this may be a mistake. We cannot just do a one-sided analysis, which will easily ignore the real problem. I will rush over immediately to analyze the anomaly with you." "
If this is true, it means that there are new and unexpected problems in the experiment. Yang Ping immediately rushed to the virus laboratory of Nandu Medical University. He wanted to see for himself what was going on. How could this be possible? It was so unexpected that we must carefully and rigorously analyze what happened.
When arriving at Nandu Medical University, Professor Zhang and the researchers in the laboratory were discussing the unexpected circumstances of this experiment. Seeing Yang Ping come in, everyone stopped discussing.
Yang Ping sat down and said, "Let's continue the discussion. I am also here to participate in the discussion and analyze the reasons behind it with everyone."
Professor Zhang Zhiwei said: "Professor Yang, why don't you take a look at some pictures of cells under an electron microscope, and then we can discuss it."
That's fine, at least Yang Ping personally verified whether this problem existed. Then he took some samples and looked at the pictures for an hour. He really didn't find a single infected cell.
Judging from the experience of the last experiment, the distribution of this kind of infection is very even, and there will be no biased concentration. Therefore, if you manually look at the pictures for an hour, you will not find an infected picture, and there will definitely not be any later.
But Yang Ping is still worried. What if there is some kind of biased concentration of infection? All the pictures in the front part have zero infection rate, while the infection is all concentrated in the pictures at the back. Just like catching fish, the fish are not necessarily evenly distributed in the river. The fisherman happens to be in a fish-free zone, so of course he cannot catch fish, but at this time it cannot be said that there are no fish in the river. This possibility is small, but not impossible. This creates an illusion that all specimens are not infected.
Science is rigorous, and you must try to be watertight when thinking about problems. Any loopholes may interfere with your thinking and cause the entire experiment to fail.
''what to do? "Professor Zhang Zhiwei feels the seriousness of the situation. If this is the case, then the experiment may have failed because the infection rate in the experiment at that time was relatively low. However, if the infection rate can be maintained, multiple treatments can achieve excellent results. Now suddenly zero Infection rates, there will be no treatment effect anyway.
"We first rule out whether there is a fault in the image recognition software, randomly shuffle the order of all the pictures, and use the image recognition software to go through it again. We call up all the electron microscope pictures from the past few experiments and use the image recognition software to go through it again. The detection It’s time to ask software developers to participate in the analysis, so that we can detect whether there are problems with the software. If there is no problem with the software, we will randomly select a part from the scrambled pictures, and we will perform manual picture recognition to extend the time for manual picture recognition. Work hard."
After some thought, Yang Ping came up with his own solution. The experiment was already in progress. Important things must not be missed due to any negligence.
Professor Zhang Zhiwei immediately arranged the work. In order to shorten the experiment time, Yang Ping transferred all the laboratory staff of Sanbo Hospital to help read the pictures. They all have the literacy of reading pictures. The speed of manual picture reading is very slow, one by one. From a practical perspective, the more people look at the pictures, the larger the sample size, and the conclusions drawn are much more reliable.
All the computers in the laboratory were used, and everyone took turns to read the pictures carefully and carefully. When the machines are incapable of functioning or cannot be trusted, manpower is the only and last resort.
The most reliable people are people, and the least reliable people are people. This sentence also applies to machines.
The computers formed a large circle, and Yang Ping and Professor Zhang Zhiwei sat in the middle of the circle. Yang Ping closed his eyes and rested. He was thinking about what loopholes he had not thought of in this experiment. Professor Zhang Zhiwei did not speak. When the experiment encountered such a sudden change, if the change was true and not caused by machine error, it would mean that the previous efforts may have been in vain, which made Professor Zhang Zhiwei feel very uncomfortable.
Manual picture recognition is very hard on the eyes. In order to see more pictures, everyone has to buy a few bags of eye drops temporarily, but there is no way. If the number of samples is too small, it cannot explain the problem, so everyone tries to look at as many pictures as possible.
At about ten o'clock in the evening, Yang Ping looked at the time: "Everyone, stop working and have a good rest tonight. We will continue tomorrow. Follow-up puncture and blood samples will also be sent tomorrow. We will add another experimenter tomorrow. This makes the data more reliable.”
Originally, the experimental times of Zhao Yufan and Sisi were staggered, but now they must be done together so that the experimental data of the two can be compared to prevent some deviations.
Yang Ping didn't want everyone to stay up late. This work was important, but it was definitely not urgent. There was no need to sacrifice health to shorten these dozen hours. Staying up late not only damages your health, but can also cause errors in this delicate work. When people are exhausted, their concentration will definitely decrease, and it is easy to miss the details of some pictures.
The work continued the next day and continued into the evening. A total of 12,000 pictures were manually read, and 27 pictures were considered to be infected by the virus. However, after review by Professors Yang Ping and Zhang Zhiwei, these 27 pictures were considered to be misjudgments. , the tumor cells in these pictures were also not infected by the virus.
The result of manual image recognition is that among the 12,000 images, not a single tumor cell is infected.
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So is there any problem with the image recognition software? After testing the image recognition software using the original pictures, it was found that there was no problem with the image recognition software at all. So the abnormal data that appeared in this test is a fact.
Combining manual image reading with software image reading, none of the tumor cells in this experiment were infected, indicating that either the infection rate was zero or the infection rate was extremely low, resulting in no positive samples being collected at all. Why is this happening? situation.
Why is this happening?
Yang Ping summoned all experimental team members for a meeting to discuss.
"The K virus we used is the same as in previous experiments. Now when this happens, there are several possibilities: 1. The K virus is killed by the human immune system before it reaches its target; 2. The K virus loses its ability to infect tumor cells. Ability." Professor Zhang Zhiwei analyzed.
Lu Xiaolu agreed with this view. After some thought, he said: "No matter which of the two situations it is, either the K virus has mutated and its ability to fight the immune system or infect tumor cells has been reduced or lost; or the human body In several experiments, we have gained some ability to deal with it, such as an enhanced immune killing ability against it, or certain changes in tumor cells that can reject this virus. After all, the K virus is a genetically modified virus and is stable. Not necessarily good."
Yang Ping nodded. Everyone's analysis was correct. This problem has always been the same. Now we need to find out which situation it is and how to solve the problem.
"Regarding the questions just raised by everyone, we need to come up with a detailed plan to analyze and solve the problems, such as: virus structure analysis to see if it has mutated? Antibody detection in the experimenter's body to see if there is any production of antibodies against this problem. Specific antibodies against the virus? Structural analysis of tumor cells to see if tumor cells have some kind of escape or protection mechanism against it?" Yang Ping said.
A lot of detailed work needs to be done around these issues, so scientific research is hard work. When you think you are close to success, it is actually an illusion, and you finally find out that the entire experiment is wrong. Just when you think there is a bright future in another village, you are actually entering a dead end.
If a high-efficiency antibody has appeared in the body of the experimenter, after these antibodies recognize the K virus, they will then surround the virus and block it from the human cells. The virus will not be able to invade the cells or reproduce, and it will slowly and gradually Decomposition is a common method used by the human immune system to deal with viruses.
In order to clarify the antibody problem, Sisi's blood could only be taken to test for K-virus antibodies. In order to detect antibodies, a set of antibody detection methods and corresponding reagents must be developed.
This requires research cooperation with Ruixing Company. Ruixing Company now has branches specializing in the production of diagnostic reagents and other products, and a group of research technicians specializing in the development of diagnostic products. In order to make the development of diagnostic reagents smoother, Yang Ping asked Sanbo Hospital The laboratory department is also involved in the research, which combines pathogen research, diagnostic reagent research and diagnostic clinical research.
This is just one aspect of research, there are also structural analysis of tumor cells, K-virus structural analysis, etc. The next work is very troublesome and cannot be carried out without extremely high enthusiasm.
Yang Ping can't tell where the turning point of this experiment will take the experiment.