Two NIH grants that funded the work in Wuhanwere finally made publicly available. They were not provided voluntarily though. It is the Intercept that finally provided access to these two NIH grants, not any public agency. And they had to sue the NIH to get access to their Freedom Of Information Act request for these “public” documents and they are staggering! The type of research done is what we describe as crazy dangerous! 

Wait! What? The human genome was not fully decoded already? That’s right, even though the Human Genome Project exhibited the first maps of the human genome in 2000, and announced it as complete in 2003 – a small fraction of the human genome was never resolved due to technological limitations. But the day has finally arrived!

One very strong candidate for the evasion of antibodies, including those of vaccines, that you might have heard about, is the Lambda variant. We wanted to drill in a bit deeper here to show you on a molecular level how cleverly the virus has mutated to start escaping the antibodies specifically mounted against the viral spike protein. And also how viruses could potentially take advantage of antibodies to infect more cells.

This article was inspired by what we consider to be the best illustration of overall immune system functions that we have seen. More specifically, the illustration concerns the immune system reaction to a viral infection by enveloped viruses such as coronaviruses.

This post is a dramatic recounting of a mental health patient who used clinical pharmacogenetic DNA testing to improve their situation. This story has turned out to surpass our expectations in how much this individual was helped! Not only were we able to identify that a medication this person was on had an important personal use warning based on that patient’s genetics, but also another massive change took place for the benefit of this patient afterwards.

This post examines the theories of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche about virus immune escape. And specifically, his claims that mass vaccinations will potentially help develop immune escape variants of SARS Co-V-2 and why this could be very dangerous to everybody.

Pharmacogenetics/pharmacogenomics is the study of how our genes impact the medications we take. Each one of us is programmed by having a variety of different mutations in our genes that influence how medications are processed by our body, and this information can be collected and then examined to help determine how medications should be dosed to best match how we metabolize (break down within our body) the medications we use, or even help avoid taking medication altogether because it could be toxic to us. Here we describe how the levels of evidence for pharmacogenetics are established.

After a year long campaign of ridiculing and silencing any public suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory, suddenly the media is very open to entertaining this notion. This is such a strange tale of how public perception is shaped by prevailing propaganda, but what we can say with high certainty is that the public’s perception in the US of the virus’ origin has so far been shaped by two figures with a staggering conflict of interest: Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak.

This post is to inform doctors who are starting to realize the value of medical DNA testing and to inform them about the best indications that DNA testing should be strongly considered. DNA tests are selected for patients as a possibility to obtain a clearer clinical picture.

Polycystic kidney disease is a genetic disorder that can affect the kidneys. It causes cysts in the organs and makes them swell up, which over time could lead to renal failure if untreated. Polycystic kidney disease can be caused by mutations to different genes, some of which will be discussed in this post.

Everyone in the world probably knows by now that if someone gets infected by SARS-CoV-2 virus, the resulting impact can range from a complete lack of symptoms to severe respiratory failure leading to death. Obviously, one possible contributing factor that would be worth investigating is the role of our personal genetics. So, what have we learned so far?

This post explains the different DNA testing options available to patients/consumers who seek to discover potential genetic causes of an already existing condition. The testing also applies to a person who wants to screen before any clinical symptoms of a condition become apparent.

With all the attention of the COVID-19 causing virus (SARS-CoV-2), we have been bumping into lots of literature related to viruses in general and one virus in particular grabbed our attention as it has been reported to be the leading cause of birth defects in newborns worldwide. The virus of interest is the human cytomegalovirus (CMV) which belongs in the herpes viruses family.

Anticancer drug therapy, widely known as chemotherapy, uses medication to kill or slow down cancer cell growth. However, its effectiveness has huge fluctuations between individuals. The outcomes in some people are promising, while the same anticancer drug might have little to no effect in others with the same classification of tumor. The unpredictability of anticancer therapy outcomes is due to the diversity of genetic backgrounds of each patient. This is where precision oncology comes in. Defining a genetic characterization for individual tumors and how they will respond to anticancer drugs is key in guiding optimal patient tailored therapy on a case-by-case basis.

This article is based on the information that is reported in a publicly available database compiled by the US Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), termed the Vaccination Adverse Events Reporting System. This database was set up approximately 30 years ago to allow anyone to report any side effect (whether adverse or non-adverse) suspected to be from taking a vaccination. The idea of the database is to be able to capture any worrisome events and allow rapid investigations of vaccine safety. We hope we have got your curiosity going enough to now check out what this database has shown so far for the different vaccines, and especially how that might compare to the new mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The results are definitely captivating.

There are 1 million caregivers in Alberta! That means the non-paid, non-professional people often are working, are raising children, have their own lives while taking on this additional role to help someone else live, people with disabilities, with health challenges and with aging-related needs. A lot of the caregiving role leads to emotional burnout. Caregivers Alberta was created by caregivers to support caregivers, working with clients on increasing their resiliency and their ability to bounce back from stressful situations and crises.

In the summer of 2020, a curious hypothesis came out that perhaps COVID-19 actually emerged many years prior in China. This hypothesis was based on the fact that in 2012 six miners became severely ill with a mysterious inflammatory lung disease. Drs. Latham and Wilson proposed that SARS-CoV-2 could actually have evolved in the lungs of the miners that became ill after being infected with a bat virus. One major problem with this hypothesis was that there was no prior scientific evidence that human lung tissue could act as an environment that could drive the substantial mutational changes that would be required for adaptation of a bat virus to a human-infectious virus. However, thanks to the current pandemic taking place around the world, it appears that we finally have evidence that this indeed can happen.

For the past couple of years, in celebration of Valentine’s Day, Merogenomics has posted articles dedicated to the genetics that concern romantic relationships. We started the trend with the genetics of sexuality, then last year we moved to the genetics of love, and we wanted to play a “dirty” joke by completing the trinity of relational aspects with a topic dedicated to… the genetics of cheating!

For a fifth year in a row, we review the most shared genetic stories on social. The only metric we look at is the highest number of shares for any content related to genetics. These are all over the board, from absurd to celebration of our greatest achievements, DNA-related stories that captured our imagination the most in 2020!

This story of a UK new SARS-CoV-2 strain exemplifies how rapidly the leaders are willing to respond to maintain the general safety of the populatio. How the decision was made to proclaim the emergence of this new threatening strain is not discussed in the media and very few have actually probed for its scientific merit. But are you curious, where did it come from? Very few people get to peak behind the curtains.