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he Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA, tiny molecules that help control how genes are expressed. Their findings unlocked new areas of research into the roles these molecules play in human health. Researchers are exploring microRNA treatments for cancer, hepatitis and heart disease. Ambros and Ruvkun were postdoctoral fellows in the 1980s in the laboratory of biologist Robert Horvitz, who won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his research in gene regulation. In Horvitz’s lab, they studied the roundworm C. elegans to better understand the role genes play in...

The discovery of a new wild coronavirus that has the same freak mutation as Covid-19 is being hailed by some scientists as proof Sars-CoV-2 was not made in a lab. Researchers in China have found another bat coronavirus that possesses a furin cleavage site — the part that made Covid-19 so good at infecting people. The furin has been one of the focal points of debate about Covid-19's origin, with some experts claiming it could only have been acquired through lab experiments. Since then, studies have shown that wild coronaviruses can acquire the structure naturally — but the newly-discovered virus...

The FDA-approved lung cancer drug osimertinib (sold under the brand name Tagrisso) slashes the risk of death by 51% for certain patients whose cancer is caught early, according to new trial data. “This should be the new standard of care for these patients,” Nathan Pennell, co-director of the Cleveland Clinic Lung Cancer Program, who wasn’t involved in the drug’s development, said in a statement for the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The drug: Lung cancer is the second-most common cancer in the world, with 2.2 million new diagnoses every year. The vast majority fall into a category called “non-small cell...

A new COVID-19 variant fueling a rise in cases is causing a new symptom that has not been associated with the virus during the three-plus years of the pandemic.The so-called Arcturus strain — officially known as XBB.1.16 — is believed to be one of the most infectious versions of the Omicron variant to date. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) variant tracker, XBB.1.16 United States cases have doubled in the last week.Itchy, red eyes not seen in earlier waves "are symptoms of the new Omicron variant," according to a brand-new report by the Mayo Clinic."One new...

A new study has found that in women with BRCA gene mutations, having a high body mass index (BMI) is linked to more DNA damage in breast cells. Specifically, the study discovered that elevated BMI was associated with more damage to epithelium tissue DNA. Priya Bhardwaj, Ph.D. Candidate and her team worked with cultured healthy breast tissues collected from individuals with mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The samples were categorized as coming from a donor of lower weight (BMI < 25 kg/m2, n = 43) or overweight/obese (BMI ≥ 25.0 kg/m2, n = 26). BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are protecting...

Pfizer late Jan. 28 responded to comments from a director at the company about exploring ways to mutate COVID-19 as a method to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”“In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research,” Pfizer said in a lengthy written statement after days of ignoring queries from The Epoch Times and other outlets.Pfizer did say that it has conducted research “where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.”“This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has...

Corporate media blackout of the story but the weirdness is compelling.The incredible undercover video of a senior Pfizer executive boasting about “mutating” the Covid virus released Wednesday by Project Veritas is making waves, even though the corporate media have completely ignored it as Google suppresses searches for it. Here is the original video itself of Pfizer's Jordon Trishton Walker regaling his companion, unaware that he was being recorded. The incredible undercover video of a senior Pfizer executive boasting about “mutating” the Covid virus released Wednesday by Project Veritas is making waves, even though the corporate media have completely ignored it...

<p>The footage was released late Wednesday night by guerilla journalism outfit Project Veritas, and entirely proves the thesis first mooted by The National Pulse and others, which were routinely dismissed as “conspiracy theories” by politicians, bureaucrats, and the corporate media.</p>

Well, here's the medical facts that entirely explain why people with more shots get more covid. I've been paying attention to this possibility for a while but until the study work came out that proved it all there was is speculation. ADE ("Antibody dependent enhancement") is a fairly poorly-understood thing; most people believe it is confined to making a particular infection more serious than it would otherwise be. Of course having it occur when it otherwise would not fits that quite-nicely, but isn't what people tend to think about. Now, unfortunately, we have the evidence. Here's the salient graph and...

Short answer: Probably not.Longer answer: Probably not, and even if it has, it might not be dangerous enough to do real damage given how much immunity the population now has.I wrote about the new Omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, a few weeks ago. Early indications are that they’re more contagious than the current dominant subvariant in the U.S., BA.2.12.1, which is more contagious than the original Omicron, which was itself insanely contagious. Worse, because natural immunity from Omicron appears to last only a few months, a prior infection is no real defense to BA.4 and BA.5. In fact, the two...

A new outbreak of Zika virus is quite possible, warn researchers, with a single mutation potentially enough to trigger an explosive spread. The disease caused a global medical emergency in 2016, with thousands of babies born brain-damaged after their mums became infected while pregnant. US scientists say the world should be on the lookout for new mutations.Lab work, described in the journal Cell Reports, suggests the virus could easily shift, creating new variants.Recent infection studies suggest those variants may prove effective at transmitting the virus, even in countries which have built up immunity from previous outbreaks of Zika, say the...

A new version of the Omicron coronavirus variant was designated on Tuesday that experts say will be harder to track because of its genetics. The new lineage, called BA.2, has been spotted seven times so far across South Africa, Australia, and Canada. BA.2 is genetically quite different from the original Omicron lineage, now called BA.1, which has been spreading across the world, said Francois Balloux, the director of the University College London Genetics Institute, per The Guardian. Crucially, it doesn't have the characteristic S-gene dropout mutation which allows Omicron BA.1 to be easily identified via PCR test results, the main...

Affiliations 1 Rui Wang, Department of Mathematics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, United States. 2 Jiahui Chen, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, United States. 3 Guo-Wei Wei, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, United States. PMID: 34873910 DOI: ACS PUBLICATIONS ABSTRACTThe importance of understanding SARS-CoV-2 evolution cannot be overlooked. Recent studies confirm that natural selection is the dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution, which favors mutations that strengthen viral infectivity. Here, we demonstrate that vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations provide a new mechanism of viral...

The Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus is better at evading immunity from prior infection than the Delta and Beta variants, according to researchers in South Africa.Scientists in the country analyzed surveillance data and say the numbers indicate the risk of reinfection tripled between the beginning of October and the end of November.“We find evidence of a substantial and ongoing increase in the risk of reinfection that is temporally consistent with the timing of the emergence of the Omicron variant in South Africa, suggesting that its selection advantage is at least partially driven by an increased ability...

The recent rollout of the Omicron Covid strain has prompted me to point out a few salient facts which may have escaped the notice of others. An advantage of viewing life from the cheap seats is a certain degree of perspective which is denied those who move and shake the times, or even those who watch closer to the field of play. Now, I realize that the aforementioned Omicron should actually be named the Xi strain, Xi being the next Greek letter in the on-deck circle for the never-ending cavalcade of Covid mutations in the batting order. However, the coach...

Researchers in South Africa are racing to track the concerning rise of a new variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The variant harbours a large number of mutations found in other variants, including Delta, and it seems to be spreading quickly across South Africa. A top priority is to track the variant more closely as it spreads: it was first identified in Botswana this month and has turned up in travellers to Hong Kong from South Africa. Scientists are also trying to understand the variant’s properties, such as whether it can evade immune responses triggered by vaccines and whether...

According to South Africa's medical chief. https://youtu.be/Yp4ncch9b1M

Several issues arose when comparing SARS-CoV-2 samples from breakthrough infections with the rest of the infected community. For instance, the circulation of viral variants changed over time, with Delta being the predominant strain towards the end of the study period. For this reason, collecting samples of breakthrough infections during the study were uneven and heavily focused on the end of 2021. To address these concerns, the researchers created a Bayesian analysis combining an autoregressive moving average model with multinominal logistic regression. The model accounted for uncertainty and random changes in viral circulation weekly. The presence of one Delta lineage, B.1.617.2,...

A new variant has been detected in a Kentucky nursing home, infecting 45 residents and health care personnel. Many of these infections arose in fully vaccinated individuals. The variant, which originated in Japan, has over 10,000 entries in the GISAID SARS-CoV-2 database. The variant contains five mutations previously noted in variants of concern or interest, two of which are in the Spike protein (Figure 1). It also contains many unique mutations. Here we describe the potential effects of each mutation on replication, immune evasion, and pathogenesis. Mutations in R.1 found in other variants. Those in red are unique to R.1....

A new coronavirus variant, C.1.2, has been detected in South Africa and a number of other countries, with concerns that it could be more infectious and evade vaccines, according to a new preprint study by South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform. The study is awaiting peer review. Scientists first detected C.1.2 in May 2021, finding that it was descended from C.1, which scientists found surprising as C.1 had last been detected in January. The new variant has "mutated substantially" compared to C.1 and is more mutations away from the original virus...