Engineered Virus Might Be Able to Block Coronavirus Infections, Mouse Study Shows

Intelligent Bio-engineering Design, —but instead, by man.

/More mouse studies, please.

`

Interesting! Let's hope they're successful and we can get back to normal life!

An actual cure would be the best, as it would allow us to go back to normal life - if we get the CV, we can be cured!

Thanks for sharing!

And better yet, with a vaccine, people won't even have to worry about being exposed.

I think that's how it works.

This statement is worrisome:

"No vaccines exist that protect people against infections by coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, or the ones that cause SARS and MERS. "

What happened to stop the spread of SARS and MERS?

What happened to stop the spread of SARS and MERS?

Ironically, SARS and MERS are less dangerous because they have a higher fatality rate. Someone who is deathly sick (SARS or MERS) doesn't go about spreading the contagion whereas someone who only feels crappy or not too bad at all (COVID-19) is likely to spread it to friends and coworkers.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vaccine/607000/

Thanks.

It appears SARS and MERS did not make a very effective evolutionary adaptation when jumping to humans.

Isn't COVID-19 basically the same virus evolved to have a better survival mechanism? Bats are threatened by lots of new environmental factors so jumping to humans improves survival. If so the next one will probably be tougher still.

Well, from what I've read, "we" facilitated the transfer through wet markets. Fortunately, the COVID-19 doesn't seem to be mutating, making it simpler to come up with a vaccine, but perhaps it doesn't have to.

Evolution happens when mutations create a strain that is better able to survive and especially reproduce. Pathogens usually start out with a relatively high lethality, which is not good for them. If the host dies, he/she does not spread the disease and help the pathogen to propagate.

If a less-lethal mutation occurs, it is more successful at reproduction and eventually, diseases will adapt to their "host" and the carrier will suffer fewer ill effects.

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/search/imagedetail.php?id=407&topic_id=&keywords=fitness

Exactly what I was thinking. Thanks for doing the reading I'm too lazy or busy to get to.

From this evolutionary perspective the most successful corona virus is the common cold. No cure or vaccine but really just a nuisance as far as symptoms go. But was it the virus that evolved or humans?

But was it the virus that evolved or humans?

I would say that since a virus reproduces much faster than humans that it would be mostly the virus.

..."Because there are more than 200 viruses that cause the common cold, the human body can never build up resistance to all of them. "...

I might add here that all viruses do not mutate to a more 'successful' strain...A virus is not a living thinking animal, just a random bag of genetic material, a piece of life that can effect other organisms once in a while by combining with other genetic material...

There are probably millions of different viruses that infect mammals...

..." If the 5,486 known mammalian species each harbor 58 viruses, there would be ~320,000 unknown viruses that infect mammals. This is likely to be under-estimate as only 9 viral families were targeted by the study. In addition, the PCR approach only detects viruses similar to those that we already know. Unbiased approaches, such as deep DNA sequencing, would likely detect more."...

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/166606

https://www.virology.ws/2013/09/06/how-many-viruses-on-earth/

Is a virus alive? I remember from many years ago that a virus isn't alive and a bacteria is. However, we talk about killing a virus???

One of my friends said that he thinks of a virus as an alien. I comes into our body, uses us as an incubator, then blows up in us (we sneeze it out) and it transfers to many other people, duplicating the process.

I think of a virus as a large particle that has DNA that attaches to the host and controls it to reproduce the virus.

GA Solar!

I see what you're saying, but if SARS and MERS are still out there (in the animal population), why aren't we seeing infections in people who don't have it in their immune system?

Or, did the SARS and MERS virus somehow go away - completely out of the world?

On the same vein, how is it possible that CV had not infected humans until December 2019? Unless it's a new virus that mutated from something else?

Unfortunately mouse models seldom translate to humans...

..."The traditional path of drug development passes from in vitro screening and response assessment to validation of drug efficacy in cell line xenografts. While xenografts have their merits, historically, more often than not, they have not served as an accurate predictor of drug efficacy in humans."...

Drug Efficacy Testing in Mice