BEWARE BIOLOGY LABORATORY ACCIDENTS

2023: against « gain of function experiments » involving pathogens

To display the titles of daily news, click on the triangles, or click on "Show all news" to  show the whole text of the news. To go back go to the site Home page, or to the site map.

Show all news | Titles only

	26 December 2023. Spurious immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 vaccines using synthetic RNA. Using synthetic RNA-containing modified nucleotides can produce immunogenic proteins that act as efficient vaccines. Billions of people have been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 in this way, and the pandemic has progressively become under control. This was an unexpected success because this demonstrated that replacing uridine by N1-methyl-pseudo-uridine in a synthetic RNA mimicking part of the virus could be stabilizing the RNA, alleviating its role in triggering innate immunity while being translated correctly by the host cells ribosome. However the process of translation is an exquisite balance between speed and accuracy, and changing one of the translated codons is expected to alter this balance. This is indeed the case: the synthetic RNA is sometimes slipping in the ribosome, resulting in an alteration of the translated frame. The corresponding +1 frameshift will result in the synthesis within the host cell of a protein that differs from the virus protein and against which the host will build up an immune response. This had no identified effect in the billions of vaccinated people, but it is important to have this fact in mind for future developments of synthetic RNA vaccines or antimicrobial drugs using synthetic RNA.
	24 November 2023. Entering the first winter season in the Northern hemisphere after the SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic. Our diseases are shaped by the way we behave. As a highly social animal, man is doomed to propagate diseases that follow the various ways in which contacts between people are established. In winter time we tend to go indoors and reduce our social distances. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a reduction in contacts, thanks in particular to the widespread use of masks. Now that all these restrictions have been lifted, we can expect an explosion of respiratory illnesses caused by the main viral and bacterial pathogens that infect the lungs and upper respiratory tract. Our main concern should be to monitor the expected increase in co-infection by different pathogens, as this would greatly increase the possibility of reassortment and recombination between their genomes. This could lead to the emergence of a dangerous new pathogen. In this respect, reassortment between influenza viruses needs to be closely monitored.
	27 September 2023. The antiviral drug we reported as a mutagen has influenced the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The idea of using analogues of the basic building blocks that form the body of a virus to prevent it from multiplying is an old one. We noted an attempt to use this highly publicised approach as a success at the time, leading to a high error rate during replication of the viral genome, and warned that this mutagenic effect could have harmful consequences. Unfortunately, this is also the case for the virus itself: the use of molnupiravir allows the virus to explore an entirely new evolutionary landscape. This opens up new avenues of adaptation that would not otherwise have been explored and thus jeopardizes our way to control the pandemic.
	28 July 2023. Prestige BioTech, a company registered in Nevada but not authorised to operate in California, left dangerous samples unattended. Prestige BioTech moved assets belonging to a defunct company, Universal Meditech Inc., to a warehouse in the Fresno county in California. "Certain rooms of the warehouse were found to contain several vessels of liquid and various apparatus," court documents said. "Fresno County Public Health staff also observed blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material." Hundreds of mice at the warehouse were kept in inhumane conditions. The city took possession of the animals in April, euthanizing 773 of them; more than 175 were found dead. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested the substances and detected at least 20 potentially infectious agents, including coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis and herpes. This shows that serious accidents are waiting to happen even in places where there are strict regulations controlling biological materials in principle.
	17 July 2023. Billions of snow crabs (Chionoecetes opilio) have disappeared from the Bering Sea. Likely linked to record-warm ocean temperatures and less ice formation in the Arctic region, and after a burst in 2018, a massive, unexpected drop in the snow crab population was recorded in 2021. Since then US federal authorities severely limited the allowable catch and fisheries were closed in 2022. Other crab species are also disappearing rapidly. As its name indicates (χιονι means ice in Greek) the species of this genus depend on ice and the plankton linked to cold sea which is eaten by their preys: small crustaceans, mollusks, worms and all the life forms thriving on plankton. These crabs are psychrophilic organisms that do not tolerate temperatures above 5°C or so. This collapse should sound as an alarm clock monitoring the status of the food chain in the Northern Hemisphere.
	20 May 2023. A significant COVID-19 outbreak is developing in Hong Kong. The number of daily cases has reached 10,000 in Hong Kong, but the health authorities said the epidemic is manageable due to a high vaccination rate and less severe disease. As of Friday, about 2,700 Covid-19 patients were hospitalized, with a relatively short average length of stay of 4.8 days.
	16 April 2023. Organized by the Beijing Genome Institute (BGI) the annual international conference ICG-18 began on April 12th and will end up April 28th. It is scheduled to be held in various locations including Zhangjiajie, Beijing, Xi'an, Nanjing, Wenzhou, Shanghai, Singapore, Hangzhou, and possibly London. Besides the usual emphasis on the Human Genome Project, this year will see a celebration of the 80th anniversary of Schrödinger's What is life ? This will be presented in a keynote lecture on April 22nd in Singapore.
	11 April 2023. Antibiotic resistance genes have been widely found in probiotic bacteria from food and food supplements. A study published in Eurosurveillance shows that the genome of a considerable number of bacteria used as food supplements, for example in yoghourts, is contaminated by antibiotic resistance gene clusters, often mobile. This is a matter of great concern as this implies that antibiotic resistance can be spread via industrial food. Among the probiotic species analyzed, Bifidobacterium animalis and Lactococcus lactis had the highest proportion of antibiotic resistance-positive samples.
	3 February 2023. Laboratory / factory accidents do happen. Making vaccines with live organisms is important, and containment is important. Because the organisms of interest are innocuous, or even protective, accidents should not be a matter of great concern. However, such accidents are a way to monitor the plausibility that this happens under much more worrying circumstances. The isolation of vaccine poliovirus WPV3 in a sewage sample in the Netherlands, led to identification, isolation and monitoring, as well as tracing of contacts of an infected employee.
	29 January 2023. A terrifying gain of function experiment using the mink-transmitted form of the H5N1 avian flu virus may be under way. According to the Science magazine “Monne says her team and others are now studying the properties of the mink virus and the effects of the mutations it has accumulated. Among other things, they want to study how well the virus transmits through close contact between animals. “We are planning to also do aerosol transmission studies,” she says.” It seems that some scientists, as well as financing agencies did not learn from the past hybris of irresponsible investigators. This type of experiment would not help us understand anything, except if the virus escapes the laboratory and then creates another pandemic, much worse than that of COVID-19.
	19 January 2023. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has modified its requirements for animal experiments. In the “FDA Modernization Act 2.0.” approved on Dec 23rd 2022, accepted that the use of New Approach Methodologies, also known as New Alternative Methods, or NAMs, to establish drug safety and effectiveness may be adopted in place of animal testing where appropriate. The bill amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act (FFDCA) to: Substitute the term “nonclinical tests” for the current “preclinical tests” (including tests on animals), Substitute the term “animal” for “nonclinical tests” and, Add a new section defining “nonclinical tests” to include human-relevant testing methods such as cell-based assays, microphysiological systems (such as Organ-Chips), or bioprinted or computer models. This modification will certainly lead to a significant decrease in the use of animal models before clinical studies.
	6 January 2023. The Chinese Academy of Engineering reported on its website that 20 of its members had died between December 15 and January 4. News from major cities suggest that a considerable proportion of the population has been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. More top Chinese engineers and scientists died in less than a month than usually die in a year, following the government’s decision to lift Covid controls. The same is true for famous artists or actors.
	3 January 2023. China sends SARS-CoV-2 sequences to the private data base GISAID. The Chinese health authorities have decided to communicate to the private database GISAID (and not to the International Database Collaboration, INSDC), some of the sequence data they have collected after the cessation of the "zero-COVID" policy. The data display the presence of several variants of omicron over the country. China is also monitoring waste water as an early warning system for the coronavirus, a practice followed by some countries since early in the pandemic. “Sewage surveillance” – a technique piloted in megacities like Beijing and Shenzhen – appeared on China’s national Covid-19 directives for the first time as central authorities issued a new list of monitoring strategies last week.
	1 January 2023. Where are the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from China? The Chinese National Health Commission is in the process of evaluating the exact impact of COVID-19 in China. Priority, for the time being is prevention and treatment. The exact fatality rate is still unknown. The worst variant that the world is facing right now is actually XBB 1.5 variant which makes 40% of the new infections in the USA. It seems to be driving new infections in Asia.