wow! what I have learned so far is great!

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED SO FAR!

 GENTLE PEOPLE:

   LIKE THOUSANDS OF JOURNALISTS AROUND THE WORLD, I HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING THE PROGRESS OF VACCINE RESEARCH IN THE MOST HIGHLY SUBSIDIZED LABORATORIES AROUND THE WORLD...ONLY TO BE DISAPPOINTED WITH THE SLOW AND OFTEN NEGATIVE RESULTS PRODUCED BY THOSE SAME LABORATORIES. THIS WEEK, THANKS TO PROFESSOR LEOR WEINBERGER, THERE IS NEW HOPE ON THE HORIZON! I NOW UNDERSTAND WHY PROGRESS HAS BEEN SO SLOW AND IT IS NOT THE FAULT OF THE LABORATORIES BUT THE NATURE AND ABILITY OF VIRUSES TO MUTATE, SURVIVE AND INFECT. 

 THE SARS-COV-2 OR COVID-19 VIRUS ENTERS A HUMAN CELL AND HIJACKS THE REPLICATION MACHINERY OF THE CELL, SILENTLY REPLICATING ITSELF AND INFECTING MORE HUMAN CELLS AND THEN PROVOKING A DANGEROUS IMMUNE RESPONSE...

  NOW, HOWEVER,  IT WILL BE POSSIBLE, USING CAS 9 AND CRISPR, TO REPROGRAM AND CREATE GOOD VIRUSES THAT WILL DO THE EXACT SAME THING TO NASTY VIRUSES WITHOUT PROVOKING AN IMMUNE RESPONSE THAT KILLS BOTH THE VIRUS AND THE HUMAN CELL. 

 WHAT I HAVE LEARNED RECENTLY IS THAT DANGEROUS VIRUSES: REPLICATE, MUTATE AND TRANSMIT AND UP UNTIL RECENTLY, THE HEAVILY SUBSIDIZED VACCINES CREATED TO COMBAT HIV, FLU, AND SARS-COV2,  DO NOT REPLICATE, MUTATE AND TRANSMIT TO COMBAT THE KILLER VIRUS. AFTER TWENTY YEARS OF ALMOST BURN OUT EFFORT, PROFESSOR LEOR WEINBERGER AND HIS TEAM AT THE GLADSTONE INSTITUE IN CALIFORNIA, HAVE DISCOVERED A METHOD TO CREATE AN ANTI-VIRUS VIRUS. A VIRUS SAFE FOR HUMANS BUT WHICH CAN REPLICATE, MUTATE, AND HIJACK THE DANGEROUS VIRUS AND THEN TRANSMIT ITSELF IN PLACE OF THE KILLER VIRUS, RENDERING THE KILLER VIRUS HARMLESS. THE POTENTIALLY EXCELLENT GOOD NEWS GOING ALONG WITH THIS DISCOVERY IS HOW THIS NEW FORM OF SELF-TRANSMITTING VACCINE CAN BE USED FOR ALL THE DANGEROUS VIRUSES AND NOT ONLY FOR THOSE MENTIONED ABOVE. THE CATCH 22 IS AS USUAL THE NECESSITY TO MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE THIS NEW METHOD IS SAFE FOR USE. THE POSSIBILITY TO ERADICATE VIRAL CREATED DISEASES AROUND THE WORLD IS CLOSE...VERY VERY CLOSE!

"Viruses mutate and spread from person to person, a dynamic process that often leaves us playing catch-up when there's a new disease outbreak. What if vaccines worked the same way? Virologist Leor Weinberger shares a scientific breakthrough: "hijacker therapy," a type of medical treatment that could attack, modify and spread alongside a virus, potentially treating afflicted individuals and slowing the spread of infections like HIV."

• Leor Weinberger and his team have developed novel therapies with profound implications in depriving infectious diseases, in particular HIV, of the ability to replicate.

  

  This video was produced by TEDMED. TED's editors featured it among our daily selections on the home page.

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Gladstone Institutes is an independent, non-profit biomedical research organization whose focus is to better understand, prevent, treat and cure cardiovascular, viral and neurological conditions such as heart failure, HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer's disease. Wikipedia

Located in: UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay

Address: 1650 Owens St, San Francisco, CA 94158, United States

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President: Deepak Srivastava

Founded: 1979

Phone: +1 415-734-2000

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THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

   

   An open letter to the American people:

   From my vantage point here in Canada,  I  received the impression your president Trump had trouble reading the script created for him by his lawyer and adviser, Rudolf Gulliani. The script read like it was prepared far in advance of the election and poor Trump stumbled over a few words! 

  After listening to Trump read a litany of accusations towards the Democrats, the words sore loser and sour grapes came to mind but sticking to the facts, Trump has lost this election and will now face the U.S. tax department for having never declared his income. Some of you may remember that Donald Trump was and may still be a multi-millionaire. Nobody knows for sure because he never disclosed his income before or after he became president and he continues to live so far above the average person, he might as well be an astronaut. 

 He may prove lucky to have stuffed the U.S. Supreme Court with Republican judges as they may or may not bale him out of his financial problems if he still has any remaining financial problems, but if not, he can always escape to live with his friend in Russia. 

J.N.R.

Leor Weinberger's Anti-Virus virus...works!

• Leor Weinberger and his team have developed novel therapies with profound implications in depriving infectious diseases, in particular HIV, of the ability to replicate.

  Why you should listen

  Leor Weinberger is the Bowes distinguished professor at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco, where he leads a virology discovery group focused on engineering new, resistance-proof antiviral medicines for the developing world. In 2019, Weinberger and his group succeeded in developing the first Therapeutic Interfering Particles (TIPs) and showed it to be effective against HIV in animals. He holds numerous patents for inventing novel antiviral medicines.

  Weinberger served on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Innovation review panel, and his research has been widely published in Science, Nature and Cell. He was a Pew Scholar, a Keck awardee, and a Sloan Fellow. He is the only person to win the NIH Director's Pioneer, Avant Garde and New Innovator Awards.

  Leor Weinberger’s TED talk

  20:59

  Leor Weinberger

  Can we create vaccines that mutate and spread?

  Posted Oct 2020TED Speaker

https://www.ted.com/speakers/leor_weinberger? 

Viruses mutate and spread from person to person, a dynamic process that often leaves us playing catch-up when there's a new disease outbreak. What if vaccines worked the same way? Virologist Leor Weinberger shares a scientific breakthrough: "hijacker therapy," a type of medical treatment that could attack, modify and spread alongside a virus, potentially treating afflicted individuals and slowing the spread of infections like HIV.

This video was produced by TEDMED. TED's editors featured it among our daily selections on the home page.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Leor Weinberger · Virologist

Leor Weinberger and his team have developed novel therapies with profound implications in depriving infectious diseases, in particular HIV, of the ability to replicate.

Virologist

 Weinberger Lab

Viruses mutate and spread from person to person, a dynamic process that often leaves us playing catch-up when there's a new disease outbreak. What if vaccines worked the same way? Virologist Leor Weinberger shares a scientific breakthrough: "hijacker therapy," a type of medical treatment that could attack, modify and spread alongside a virus, potentially treating afflicted individuals and slowing the spread of infections like HIV.

This video was produced by TEDMED. TED's editors featured it among our daily selections on the home page.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Leor Weinberger · Virologist

Leor Weinberger and his team have developed novel therapies with profound implications in depriving infectious diseases, in particular HIV, of the ability to replicate.

Celebrate Life!

 From human4us to human4us2

• Hello from Canada! Life is the opposite of deat...

• October 2006

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2006

Hello from Canada!

Life is the opposite of death. Today and tomorrow, death will be in the headlines and life will once again take a back seat. This blog intends to celebrate life to the fullest extent possible and I invite you to celebrate with me! As we celebrate, I am certain a few currently profiting from death will pause to wonder and maybe they also will decide to celebrate life.
In order to celebrate life we Human Beings must first understand life. To understand is to think and I believe there are enough thoughtful people in the world to create a new level of Human self awareness. If you are not conscious you are either asleep or in a coma or dead. Most living creatures think and after they have eaten and slept and gone to the bathroom, many species like to play and also to enjoy the world around them. In order for millions of my fellow Homo Sapiens to celebrate life, I have to make sure they have eaten and slept and gone to the bathroom. 
Finding food for millions of hungry Humans is difficult but not impossible. I invite your ideas and suggestions on how to feed millions of poor people in Africa and around the world in order that they also may celebrate life! 
While you are at it, try helping that poor homeless person sleeping in the alley behind your building. We have a lot of celebrating to do and we have to get busy thinking!

A great little video explaining vaccines today.

Look up this great little video...https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/video-player/18547208   

(Transcript)

Researchers are racing towards the goal of delivering a safe and effective vaccine that could curb the COVID-19 pandemic. And production scale-up for some of the vaccine candidates has already started. Consider the US government's Operation Warp Speed:

[Robert Redfield, MD:] You know I spent time in the military, so I like that concept of focusing on a mission. And the mission is to have a vaccine available to the American public by January 2021. We're on an accelerated course here that I've not witnessed before.

One of the reasons why this vaccine search is breaking records is because most of the frontrunners--and nearly all the vaccines in the Warp Speed portfolio--are based on next-generation technologies that can be developed and scaled up more quickly than conventional vaccines. These new technologies are genetic vaccines and viral vector vaccines.

These technologies--also called platforms--have been in development for decades. A lot of the investment in them has specifically focused on their potential to combat emerging infectious diseases. And COVID-19 is putting that potential to the test. Let's take a look at how they work, and how they're different from conventional vaccines.

In these pictures from 1953, (locate the video above) the scientists are developing an influenza vaccine. They're injecting viruses into fertilized eggs, which are then incubated to allow the virus to replicate within the eggs. Growing the virus is necessary for developing live attenuated virus and whole inactivated virus vaccines--these are the two classic approaches where the virus is either weakened or killed. These approaches are still in use today, although different cell cultures are most often used instead of eggs.

But since those photos were taken, huge advancements in the field of vaccinology have introduced multiple other approaches to developing vaccines. Here are the major types of vaccines being deployed against COVID-19. Unlike the two classic vaccines, these four types, which include the next-generation platforms as well as more conventional approaches, don't require researchers to handle any of the actual virus.

[Anthony S. Fauci, MD:] The Chinese, when they made the diagnosis and showed it was a coronavirus, they put the sequence up on a public database. So today you don't need the virus in hand. All you need is a sequence.

This is that published sequence for SARS-CoV-2. Because of previous research into SARS-1 and MERS, researchers knew that they could focus initial attention on the S protein, also known as the spike.

The spike is the protein that studs the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It's also necessary for viral entry into human cells. So a vaccine that exposes the immune system to just the spike should induce a protective immune response. And that's the strategy behind the majority of COVID-19 vaccine candidates, which use both next-generation and more conventional approaches. The scientific way to put this is that the spike is the target antigen in these vaccines.

Where the next-generation vaccine platforms differ from those more conventional vaccines is how the immune system is exposed to the spike, or the antigen. Conventional vaccines contain the antigen itself. Now compare this to genetic vaccines:

[Paul A. Offit, MD:] You can take just really to the genetic material, either as messenger RNA or DNA, that then codes for that spike protein. So the person makes the protein. You're not giving them the protein. You're giving them the genetic material that then instructs them how to make that spike protein, to which they make an antibody response that hopefully is protective.

Two types of genetic vaccines are being investigated for COVID-19: mRNA and DNA. mRNA needs to reach the cytoplasm of host cells, while DNA needs to enter the nucleus. Then this genetic material gets taken up by the cell's machinery, and the cell expresses the spike protein. These spike proteins are then recognized by the immune system, hopefully stimulating a protective response.

These two candidates in the Warp Speed portfolio are mRNA vaccines. This one was developed by Moderna and the NIH, and was the first candidate to enter clinical trials in the US, with this one from Pfizer and BioNTech following not long after. Naked mRNA cannot easily cross cell membranes passively, and it's very susceptible to degradation. So in both of those vaccines, the mRNA coding for the spike is encased in small carrier molecules called lipid nanoparticles. Both of these candidates are currently in Phase 3 trials.

Now let's look at viral vector vaccines.

The basic idea is that you take another virus and replace its genetic payload with the sequence coding for the antigen, in this case the spike protein. The goal is to induce immunity against the target antigen--the added genetic cargo. But these vaccines may also induce immunity to the vector itself. The viruses used as vectors are attenuated, or weakened, so they cannot cause disease. A lot of different viruses have been developed as vectors, and they can be broadly categorized into two buckets: replication-defective and replication-competent.

Let's start with replication-defective vectors. A very popular choice among the potential COVID-19 vaccines is adenoviruses, like these two candidates, which are both in phase 3 clinical trials. Adenoviruses are common pathogens that typically cause mild cold or flu-like symptoms. This candidate, which was developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, uses a chimpanzee adenovirus 5, while this candidate from Johnson & Johnson, uses a human adenovirus 26. In both vaccines the adenovirus vector carries the DNA coding for the spike to the host cells, but it doesn't display it on its surface. Once the virus infects a host cell, it delivers the DNA to the nucleus; the cell's machinery then expresses the spike using this DNA, similarly to what we saw with genetic vaccines. And because these adenovirus vectors are replication-defective, after the virus infects a cell, no more viruses are produced.

Now let's take a look at replication-competent virus vectors. This Warp Speed vaccine that's being developed by Merck in partnership with IAVI is an example; it uses recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus. In humans, wild-type VSV is usually asymptomatic or causes a mild flu-like illness. The researchers replaced part of its RNA sequence with RNA coding for the spike. Unlike the adenoviruses, this rVSV vector does display the spike on its surface. After the rVSV infects a host cell, again the cell's machinery expresses the spike; but because rVSV is replication competent, this platform mimics a real viral attack more closely.

This is the same platform that Merck used to develop a vaccine for Ebola, which was approved by the FDA last year. But so far that Ebola vaccine is the only viral vector vaccine that has gotten FDA approval. Adenovirus vectors, which are much further ahead in COVID-19 trials, have never been used in an FDA-approved vaccine, and there are likewise no FDA-approved vaccines that use DNA or mRNA platforms.

So despite the investment in these approaches, and the media attention they've been getting, it's far from certain they will curb COVID-19.

[Paul A. Offit, MD:] I think the reason that you hear the most about the mRNA vaccine or the DNA vaccine or these replication-defective adenovirus vaccines is because they're the easiest to make. So I think that's why you hear about them first, but I just would want to warn people that, you know, what you want is you want the best and safest vaccine, which may not necessarily be the first vaccines.

And the only way to find out is through rigorous trials. Before COVID-19 hit, these platforms were extensively studied in animal models, and some candidates were tested in phase 1 and 2 trials, but until now phase 3 data has been lacking.

[Paul A. Offit, MD:] This is the -- if the proof is in the pudding, the pudding is a phase three trial, a large, prospective, placebo-controlled, safety and efficacy trial.

And platforms do not save time in clinical trials. No matter the approach, rigorous safety and efficacy testing is required. The safety standard for vaccines is very high compared to other interventions, because vaccines are potentially given to millions of healthy people.

If the phase 3 trials are done correctly, there will be enough data about both safety and efficacy in diverse demographic groups to allow health officials, doctors and individuals to make informed decisions. Until that data has been adequately analyzed, it's too early to say which approaches, either novel or conventional, are the safest and most effective.

A handful of vaccines are already in phase 3 trials, so some data will be available soon; and at that point--not before--we might find out if these next-generation platforms have lived up to their potential for combating emerging infectious diseases.