Tag: humanized mice

Chinese lab crafts mutant COVID-19 strain with 100% kill rate in ‘humanized’ mice: ‘Surprisingly’ rapid death

In a Wuhan-esque study, Chinese scientists are experimenting with a mutant COVID-19 strain that is 100% lethal to “humanized” mice.

The deadly virus — known as GX_P2V — attacked the brains of mice that were engineered to reflect genetic makeup similar to people, according to a study shared last week out of Beijing.

“This underscores a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans and provides a unique model for understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses,” the authors wrote.

The deadly virus is a mutated version of GX/2017, a coronavirus cousin that was reportedly discovered in Malaysian pangolins in 2017 — three years before the pandemic. Pangolins, also called scaly anteaters, are mammals found in warm areas of the planet.

All the mice that were infected with the virus died within just eight days, which researchers noted was a “surprisingly” rapid death rate.

GX_P2V had infected the lungs, bones, eyes, tracheas and brains of the dead mice, the last of which was severe enough to ultimately cause the death of the animals.

In the days before their deaths, the mice had quickly lost weight, exhibited a hunched posture, and moved extremely sluggishly.

Most eerie of all, their eyes turned completely white the day before they died.

Although terrifying, the study is the first of its kind to report a 100% mortality rate in mice infected by the COVID-19-related virus — far surpassing previously reported results from another study, the researchers wrote.

More importantly, the results of the study do not indicate how it would affect human beings.

Francois Balloux, an epidemiology expert at University College London’s Genetics Institute, slammed the research as “terrible” and “scientifically totally pointless.”

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Scientists Inserted Neanderthal And Denisovan Genes Into Mice – Here’s What Happened

A gene that was carried by both Neanderthals and Denisovans causes mice to develop larger heads, twisted ribs, and shortened spines, according to the results of a yet-to-be-published study. Researchers used CRISPR gene editing technology to insert the ancient genetic code into rodents in order to understand how it might have contributed to the body shape of our extinct relatives.

The gene in question is known as GLI3 and plays a vital role in embryonic development in modern humans. Mutations within this gene are associated with physical malformations such as polydactyly – which refers to the growth of extra fingers or toes – and the deformation of the skull.

Neanderthals and Denisovans both carried a slightly altered version of the GLI3 gene, in which an amino acid at one end of the coding region is substituted. However, neither of these ancient species had an abnormal number of digits or life-threatening cranial defects.

As the study authors point out, though, these extinct hominid species displayed several morphological characteristics that differed from those of modern humans, “including elongated and low crania, larger brow ridges, and broader rib cages.”

To determine how the ancient form of the GLI3 gene might have affected the development of our extinct cousins, the researchers first engineered mice to carry a faulty version of the gene. This caused the rodents to develop severe skull and brain deformities as well as polydactyly, illustrating how a functioning version of the gene is essential for healthy embryonic growth.

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Sign of the End? Lab-Grown Human Brain Cells ‘Exhibit Sentience’ When Scientists Teach Them to Play Pong

According to the 1991 blockbuster “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” Skynet was supposed to have become self-aware 25 years ago, on August 29, 1997.

I know this because I took my wife to see “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” on our honeymoon … which shows you just how self-aware I was in 1991. It’s amazing she’s stuck with me for so long. But I digress.

Skynet, of course, was the huge national-defense artificial intelligence network that kept sending terminator androids back in time so that they could fail to kill Sarah Connor and her son, John. I thought of the film immediately when I saw that Australian scientists recently taught lab-grown brain cells to play Pong.

Now that I write that down, I can see how some might consider it a stretch. Stay with me, here.

According to this report, which does not appear to have been peer-reviewed prior to its publication yesterday, a culture of 800,000 stem-cell-derived human brain cells and embryo-derived mouse brain cells displayed limited “sentience,” in the sense that they were “responsive to sensory impressions.”

The researchers called their human-mouse-brain-hybrid “DishBrain” — and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

“DishBrain offers a simpler approach to test how the brain works, and gain insights into debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and dementia,” Cortical Labs CEO Dr. Hon Weng Chong explained. KOAM described Cortical Labs as a biotech start-up.

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Ratman: Human Brain Cells Grown In Rats

Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.

It’s part of an effort to better study human brain development and diseases affecting this most complex of organs, which makes us who we are but has long been shrouded in mystery.

“Many disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are likely uniquely human” but “the human brain certainly has not been very accessible,” said said Dr. Sergiu Pasca, senior author of a study describing the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Approaches that don’t involve taking tissue out of the human brain are “promising avenues in trying to tackle these conditions.”

The research builds upon the team’s previous work creating brain “organoids,” tiny structures resembling human organs that have also been made to represent others such as livers, kidneys, prostates, or key parts of them.

To make the brain organoids, Stanford University scientists transformed human skin cells into stem cells and then coaxed them to become several types of brain cells. Those cells then multiplied to form organoids resembling the cerebral cortex, the human brain’s outermost layer, which plays a key role in things like memory, thinking, learning, reasoning and emotions.

Scientists transplanted those organoids into rat pups 2 to 3 days old, a stage when brain connections are still forming. The organoids grew so that they eventually occupied a third of the hemisphere of the rat’s brain where they were implanted. Neurons from the organoids formed working connections with circuits in the brain.

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EcoHealth Throws NIH Under The Bus Over Wuhan Gain-Of-Function Report; Researcher Claims ‘Massive Cover-Up’

The question over whether the NIH funded risky gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China was officially ‘answered’ last week, after the agency claimed that one of their partners – EcoHealth Alliance, failed to report that they had ‘accidentally’ created a chimeric coronavirus that was able to infect humanized mice.

To review, in a Wednesday letter addressed to Rep. James Comer (R-KY), NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak admits to funding a “limited experiment” to determine whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” According to the letter, humanized mice infected with the modified bat virus “became sicker” than those exposed to an unmodified version of the same bat coronavirus.

The letter claims that EcoHealth CEO Peter Daszak failed to report this finding, and gave Daszak five days to submit “any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted” under the NIH grant.

If true, it would mean Dr. Anthony Fauci, who runs the NIH’sNational Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wasn’t lying when he told Sen. Rand Paul in July when he denied the agency was conducting GoF research.

Except, according to Vanity Fair, EcoHealth did report their findings in a timely manner.

“These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year four report in April 2018,” said New York City-based EcoHealth in a statement.

If that’s the case, Fauci is either incompetent for not knowing, or lying.

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After Shocking Revelations About Brutalized Dead Babies, Biden Administration To Shut Down Fetal Harvesting Probe

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary and radical pro-abortion activist Xavier Becerra shut down the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ethics board overseeing human fetal tissue research. Under President Donald Trump, the advisory board had the authority to block fetal research proposals on ethics grounds.

In April, at President Joe Biden’s direction, HHS also reversed the Trump administration’s policy prohibiting funding for intramural research using human fetal tissue. The decision gave the “best and brightest” government researchers and agencies license to use the skin, brains, liver, and eyeballs of aborted children for taxpayer-funded research. In essence, the Biden administration is allowing for taxpayer-funded harvesting of aborted babies, and now it has abolished any sort of ethical oversight.

In response, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, as well as Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer and Sen. Vicky Hartzler, both of Missouri, are leading a letter signed by more than 100 congressional Republicans on Wednesday demanding Becerra reinstate the ethics board and the policy banning funding from going to fetal tissue research. The lawmakers are asking the Biden administration to instead “embrace more avenues for research that employ ethical, non-fetal alternatives.”

The news that the Biden administration is shutting down the fetal harvesting ethics board comes in the wake of shocking details about how federal agencies traffic aborted babies. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bought organs such as livers, brains, and eyeballs of dismembered babies for hundreds of dollars apiece from Advanced Bioscience Resources, one of the country’s largest fetal tissue trafficking firms. Firms such as Advanced Bioscience Resources work as the middleman between the federal government and Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider.

The FDA pays $2,000 per individual baby, adding up to $12,000 per box of harvested organs. The FDA also requested late-term aborted babies, buying body parts from children up to 24 weeks old (babies can generally survive outside the womb as early as 22 weeks).

Most disturbing, the FDA requested organs from baby boys for “very important and … challenging” surgeries to create humanized mice. Moreover, it was uncovered that FDA employees would be joining Advanced Bioscience Resources associates at a “Humanized Mice Workshop” in Zurich in 2016.

The Center for Medical Progress reported in May that grants from the Anthony Fauci-led National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health were funding fetal tissue experiments that included stitching the scalp of a killed 5-month-old in utero child onto the back of a lab rat.

Pointing to these examples, Republican lawmakers said in their letter that the restrictions on the use of human fetal tissue in 2019 “were instituted because of glaring abuses that came to light.”

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Chinese military ‘engineered mice with humanized lungs’ in 2019 to test viruses on them – just months before the pandemic erupted

Medical researchers with the Chinese army engineered mice with humanized lungs in 2019 to test viruses on them, it has been reported. 

The mice, developed using CRISPR gene-editing technology, were mentioned in an April 2020 study which researched their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 illness, Vanity Fair revealed in its bombshell investigation.

Of the study’s 23 co-authors, 11 of them worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the medical research institute for the Chinese army.

Investigators with the U.S. National Security Council, researching the origins of the pandemic, determined that the mice referenced in the study were created in the summer of 2019 – just months before the emergence of the pandemic.

The National Security Council investigators also reportedly believed they had ‘uncovered important evidence’ supporting the theory that COVID-19 had leaked from a lab and began reaching out to other federal agencies, Vanity Fair reported.

‘We were dismissed. The response was very negative,’ said Anthony Ruggiero, the a senior director at the National Security Council.

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Scientists Use Scalps From Aborted Babies to Create “Humanized Mice” and Fauci is Funding It

A new video from the Center for Medical Progress exposes a gristly experiment at the University of Pittsburgh that involved scalping five-month aborted babies and implanting their scalps onto rodents.

Now, Pennsylvania leaders are demanding an investigation and urging the university to stop its experiments using aborted baby body parts.

“Publicly available information demonstrates that Pitt hosts some of the most barbaric experiments carried out on aborted human infants, including scalping 5-month-old aborted fetuses to stitch onto lab rats,” the Center for Medical Progress said in a statement.

The information comes from a study that University of Pittsburgh researchers published in September 2020 in the journal “Scientific Reports.” It describes how scientists used scalps from aborted babies to create “humanized” mice and rats to study the human immune system.

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