Tag: dna

Regeneron to buy bankrupt 23andMe, vows ethical use of customer DNA data

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (REGN.O), opens new tab said on Monday it will buy genomics firm 23andMe Holding for $256 million through a bankruptcy auction, and promised to prioritize the ethical use of DNA data from customers using ancestry testing and other services.

Through the deal, Tarrytown, New York-based Regeneron aims to bolster its capabilities in genomics-driven drug discovery by integrating 23andMe’s trove of more than 15 million customer DNA profiles, collected via its popular direct-to-consumer saliva-testing kits.

South San Francisco, California-based 23andMe filed for bankruptcy last month, seeking to sell its business at auction after a decline in consumer demand and a 2023 data breach that exposed sensitive genetic and personal information of millions of customers.

The second-highest bid, for $146 million, was submitted by a nonprofit research institute founded by 23andMe’s former CEO and cofounder Anne Wojcicki, according to court documents.

The transaction, expected to complete in the third quarter, puts the spotlight back on data privacy issues sparked off by the data breach. 23andMe, once a trailblazer in ancestry DNA testing, has also faced dwindling demand for its core services.

The transaction “starts to bring about a good conclusion to what otherwise could have been a difficult bankruptcy case,” said trial attorney Daniel Gielchinsky, co-founder and partner at DGIM law.

Gielchinsky said Regeneron, with its proven track record, will do a better job in the long run of protecting consumer information safeguarded by privacy laws.

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DNA Reveals Surprising Twist About Christopher Columbus

On 22 February 1498, a well-weathered mid-40s Christopher Columbus ordained in writing that his estate in the Italian port city of Genoa would be maintained for his family “because from it I came and in it I was born”.

Though most historians regard the document to be a cut-and-dried record of the famed explorer’s birthplace, some have questioned its authenticity and wondered if there’s more to the story.

Last year, a decades-long investigation led by forensics scientist José Antonio Lorente from the University of Granada in Spain came out in support of claims that Columbus may not be of Italian heritage after all, but was actually born somewhere in Spain to parents of Jewish ancestry.

The revelation was announced in October as part of a special program broadcast in Spain to celebrate Columbus’s arrival in the New World on 12 October 1492.

It’s important to keep in mind that science by media ought to be viewed with caution, especially when there isn’t a peer-reviewed publication to critically examine.

“Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, we can’t really evaluate what was in the documentary because they offered no data from the analysis whatsoever,” former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, Antonio Alonso, told Manuel Ansede and Nuño Domínguez at the Spanish news service, El País.

“My conclusion is that the documentary never shows Columbus’s DNA and, as scientists, we don’t know what analysis was undertaken.”

Nonetheless, historical documents are increasingly being challenged – and bolstered – by forensic analyses of biological records, raising the possibility that Columbus’s own DNA could potentially reveal insights into his family history.

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This 7,000-year-old mummy DNA has revealed a ‘ghost’ branch of humanity

Today, the Sahara Desert is one of the most inhospitable places on our planet. But it wasn’t always this way. 

Roll the clock back 7,000 years, and the Sahara was a lush, green savannah, teeming with wildlife, dotted with lakes – including one the size of modern-day Germany. It was, in other words, the perfect place for our ancient ancestors to settle.

But who were they? We might finally know.

Scientists have successfully analysed the DNA of two naturally mummified individuals from the Takarkori rock shelter, in what is now southwestern Libya. Their findings reveal something extraordinary: these ancient people belonged to a previously unknown branch of the human family tree.

The two women belonged to a so-called ‘ghost population’ – one that had only ever been glimpsed as faint genetic echoes in modern humans, but never found in the flesh.

“These samples come from some of the oldest mummies in the world,” Prof Johannes Krause, senior author of the new study, told BBC Science Focus. It is, he explained, remarkable that genome sequencing was possible at all, given hot conditions tend to degrade such information. 

Genome sequencing is the process of reading the complete set of genetic instructions found in an organism’s DNA – a kind of biological blueprint.

Earlier studies had examined the mummies’ mitochondrial DNA, which is much more limited. It’s passed down only through the maternal line, and is far shorter than the full genome found in the cell nucleus.

“There are around 16,000 base pairs in mitochondrial DNA,” Krause said. “That might sound like a lot, but compared to the whole genome, which has 3.2 billion, it’s just a fraction.”

So what did the team discover from this newly unlocked genetic treasure trove?

First, they found that this lost lineage split from the ancestors of sub-Saharan Africans around 50,000 years ago – about the same time other groups were beginning to migrate out of Africa. 

Remarkably, this group then remained genetically isolated from other groups of humans for tens of thousands of years, all the way through to the time when these two women died around 7,000 years ago. 

“It’s incredible,” Krause said. “At the time when they were alive, these people were almost like living fossils – like something that shouldn’t be there. If you’d told me these genomes were 40,000 years old, I would have believed it.” 

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The Return of the Dire Wolf

Romulus and Remus are doing what puppies do: chasing, tussling, nipping, nuzzling. But there’s something very un-puppylike about the snowy white 6-month olds—their size, for starters. At their young age they already measure nearly 4 ft. long, tip the scales at 80 lb., and could grow to 6 ft. and 150 lb. Then there’s their behavior: the angelic exuberance puppies exhibit in the presence of humans—trotting up for hugs, belly rubs, kisses—is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a person approaches. Even one of the handlers who raised them from birth can get only so close before Romulus and Remus flinch and retreat. This isn’t domestic canine behavior, this is wild lupine behavior: the pups are wolves. Not only that, they’re dire wolves—which means they have cause to be lonely.

The dire wolf once roamed an American range that extended as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Canada, but not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. Plenty of dire wolf remains have been discovered across the Americas, however, and that presented an opportunity for a company named Colossal Biosciences. 

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.

The dire wolf isn’t the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently employs 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.

If all this seems to smack of a P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll. Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf.

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Trump To Trans Males “You Can Never Become A Woman”

President Trump gave a stark biology lesson Wednesday as he told those gathered at the White House that trans-identified males “can never become a woman.”

“No matter how many surgeries you have or chemicals you inject, if you’re born with male DNA in every cell of your body, you can never become a woman,” Trump asserted.

“You’re not gonna become a woman,” Trump reiterated, drawing raucous cheers from the audience.

“And that’s why last month, I proudly signed a historic executive order to ban men from competing in women’s sports, and it was very popular,” he added.

The President was speaking in honour of women’s history month.

While citing American women he called “legends,” including Betsy Ross, Harriet Tubman, Susan B Anthony, Clara Barton, and Amelia Earhart, Trump also noted there are “more women in our cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.”

Those women include Susie Wiles, Karoline Leavitt, Alina Habba, Pam Bondi, Brooke Rollins, and Linda McMahon.

Referring to the previous regime, which now seems like a distant nightmare,Trump said “For four long years, we had an administration that tried to abolish the very concept of womanhood and replace it with radical gender ideology.”

“Maybe you heard something about that,” he continued, adding “They destroyed women’s spaces and even tried to replace the word mother with the term ‘birther person’, the mother became a ‘birther person’. What’s that all about?”

Trump further related how he had seen a Democrat Rep. on TV desperately trying to defend trans-identified males in women’s sports. 

“I said, this guy is going to lose. He’s going to lose badly,” the President noted, adding “The whole party is still into that. They haven’t learned, we don’t want him to learn, frankly, we want him to keep fighting.”

“Let’s not tell him under the Trump administration, we’re ending the Marxist war on women, and you had a war on women, and we’re protecting women’s rights, defending women’s dignity, and standing up for the American moms and daughters,” Trump urged.

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23andMe Files For Bankruptcy, CEO Resigns – Fate Of Americans’ DNA Data Now In Court-Supervised Sale

Shares of 23andMe crashed in premarket trading on Monday after the genetic testing unicorn startup filed for bankruptcy in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, following a slide in demand for its ancestry kits and a data breach. The bankruptcy raises one alarming question about DNA security: What will happen to the genetic data of the company’s more than 15 million customers?

23andMe announced that its CEO, Anne Wojcicki, has resigned immediately and will remain on the company’s board of directors. She led the cash-burning startup that never turned a profit and once commanded a market capitalization of nearly $6 billion in late 2021. Shares plunged 44% in the premarket to $1.

“After a thorough evaluation of strategic alternatives, we have determined that a court-supervised sale process is the best path forward to maximize the value of the business,” Mark Jensen, Chair and member of the Special Committee of the Board of Directors wrote in a statement. 

Jensen said, “We expect the court-supervised process will advance our efforts to address the operational and financial challenges we face, including further cost reductions and the resolution of legal and leasehold liabilities. We believe in the value of our people and our assets and hope that this process allows our mission of helping people access, understand and benefit from the human genome to live on for the benefit of customers and patients.”

“We want to thank our employees for their dedication to 23andMe’s mission. We are committed to supporting them as we move through the process. In addition, we are committed to continuing to safeguard customer data and being transparent about the management of user data going forward, and data privacy will be an important consideration in any potential transaction,” he added.

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Genetic Study Reveals Hidden Chapter in Story of Human Evolution

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe.

Using advanced analysis based on full genome sequences, researchers from the University of Cambridge have found evidence that modern humans are the result of a genetic mixing event between two ancient populations that diverged around 1.5 million years ago. About 300,000 years ago, these groups came back together, with one group contributing 80% of the genetic makeup of modern humans and the other contributing 20%.

For the last two decades, the prevailing view in human evolutionary genetics has been that Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, and descended from a single lineage. However, these latest results, reported in the journal  Nature Genetics, suggest a more complex story.

“The question of where we come from is one that has fascinated humans for centuries,” said first author Dr Trevor Cousins from Cambridge’s Department of Genetics. “For a long time, it’s been assumed that we evolved from a single continuous ancestral lineage, but the exact details of our origins are uncertain.”

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Hoping to revive mammoths, scientists create ‘woolly mice’

Scientists have genetically engineered mice with some key characteristics of an extinct animal that was far larger — the woolly mammoth.

This “woolly mouse” marks an important step toward achieving the researchers’ ultimate goal — bringing a woolly mammoth-like creature back from extinction, they say.

“For us, it’s an incredibly big deal,” says Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas company trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth and other extinct species.

The company announced the creation of the woolly mice Tuesday in a news release and posted a scientific paper online detailing the achievement. Scientists implanted genetically modified embryos in female lab mice that gave birth to the first of the woolly pups in October.

“This is really validation that what we have in mind for our longer-term de-extinction project is really going to work,” Shapiro told NPR in an interview. The company says reviving extinct species like the mammoth, the dodo and others could help repair ecosystems. Critics, however, question whether de-extinction would be safe for the animals or environment.

Shapiro and her colleagues started by trying to identify the genes responsible for making mammoths distinctive. They compared ancient samples of genetic material from mammoths with genetic sequences of African and Asian elephants, the mammoth’s closest living relative.

These included long, woolly hair and a way of metabolizing fat that helped the animals survive well in the cold.

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DNA Contamination Study — Conducted at FDA Lab by Students Supervised by FDA Scientists — ‘Doesn’t Belong to FDA’ Agency Says

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has responded to a peer-reviewed study conducted within its own laboratory, which uncovered excessively high levels of DNA contamination in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

The study revealed that residual DNA levels exceeded regulatory limits by six to 470 times, validating earlier studies from independent researchers that the FDA had previously disregarded.

Published by students in the Journal of High School Science, the study has garnered significant attention since the story broke, with its altimetric score rivaling those of major studies in leading medical journals.

Despite the study being conducted at the FDA’s White Oak campus in Maryland, the agency has sought to distance itself from the findings.

A spokesperson stated that the study “does not belong to the FDA” and is therefore not theirs to disclose.

“The FDA does not comment on individual studies,” the spokesperson added, declining to acknowledge the new scientific findings.

The agency also refused to address the involvement of three of its own scientists — Shuliang Liu, Ph.D., Tony Wang, M.D., and Prabhuanand Selvaraj, Ph.D. — who supervised the students conducting the study.

When questioned about potential regulatory actions, such as issuing a public alert, recalling affected vaccine batches, or notifying other agencies, the FDA stood firm in its defense of mRNA vaccine safety.

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Unmasking the Contamination Crisis in mRNA Injectable Drugs: A Public Health Catastrophe in the Making

The alarm bells began to ring loudly when Kevin McKernan first uncovered alarmingly high levels of DNA contamination in early 2023, a finding that has since been corroborated by numerous independent scientists. The most recent revelation comes from a study conducted in a laboratory utilized by the FDA itself, exposing staggering levels of contamination in every analyzed vaccine lot. This discovery, particularly significant because of the FDA’s connection, suggests that the problem may be even worse than initially reported. Methodological limitations raise the possibility that larger, more dangerous DNA fragments capable of disrupting cellular functions remain undetected. Instead of taking responsibility, the FDA—the agency charged with safeguarding public health—has chosen to distance itself from these damning findings. By denying ownership of the study and refusing to act, the FDA has demonstrated a chilling disregard for public safety, prioritizing perception over accountability.

DNA contamination, even in small fragments, is far from a hypothetical risk confined to theoretical science. These fragments can trigger immune pathways like cGAS-STING,[1] leading to chronic inflammation and immune system dysregulation. The threat of genomic integration—where foreign DNA integrates into human cells—looms ominously, with potentially catastrophic consequences if it occurs in critical regions such as oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes. This risk is compounded by the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used in vaccine delivery, which protect these fragments and enhance their ability to enter human cells. The very mechanism designed to deliver the mRNA payload efficiently may inadvertently pave the way for these fragments to wreak havoc within the human body.

The FDA laboratory’s report indicated that the DNA contamination consisted of non-replicating fragments, which might appear less dangerous at first glance. The probability of genomic integration was estimated at approximately 1 in 10 million cells. While this figure may sound reassuringly small, the broader context reveals a much more alarming reality. The human body contains roughly 37 trillion cells, meaning that even such a low probability translates to an average of around 3,700 cells per individual potentially experiencing genomic integration. If foreign DNA integrates into critical genomic regions in just one of these cells,[2] the results could be catastrophic, leading to mutations that may escape immune detection and cause severe health outcomes over time.

When scaled to the billions of vaccinated individuals worldwide, the potential for population-wide health impacts becomes staggering. The sheer number of affected cells across global populations magnifies the risk of rare but severe reactions, challenging the dismissive assurances of safety provided by regulatory bodies. These are not merely theoretical risks; they are statistically plausible outcomes that demand immediate scrutiny and decisive action. The scale and scope of these potential outcomes should compel regulatory agencies and manufacturers to halt vaccine distribution until these dangers are fully understood and mitigated.

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