Frank Ryan's Blog

I'm delighted to say that in November 2020 The Mysterious World of the Human Genome has been included in the list of "12 outstanding books revealing the mysteries of our genes.

The Mysterious World of the Human Genome

In a chapter in a new book on symbiosis by Springer Nature, I redefine and defend the essential nature of viruses as "non-cellular, capsid-encoding obligate symbionts". I also propose that they have played, and are still playing, a vital role in the evolution of biodiversity, and massively so the evolution of the placental mammals, and contribute an essential role in the health and functioning of the biosphere. When you put all of that together, it becomes rational to classify viruses as the fourth, and only non-cellular, domain of life.

Publication of the book was delayed by COVID. I outlined some of the evidence for the above in my book Virusphere, which was aimed at a non-expert reader. When the chapter is published, hopefully in August, I shall duly provide the reference.

I'm pleased to say that, today (20 June 2020) the Oxford Vaccine, aimed at raising immunity against COVID-19, is reported to be looking promising from the results of phase 1 and 2 studies. It provokes a strong antibody and strong T-cell response in triallists while causing no serious ill effects.

The vaccine would now move to phase 3 multicentre trials.

A recent retrospective study published in the latest Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that statins administered to veterans aged 75 and over, who had no serious atheroma to start with, showed a lower all cause and cardiovascular mortality over the period of study.

JAMA. 2020;324(1):68-78. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.7848

Hi,

Apologies to my readers for the fact that all three of my websites, frankpryan.com, fprbooks.com and swiftpublishers.com have been peremptorily closed by TSOhost, which had taken over Mr Site. I've reconstructed my fiction site with Bluehost and should have it up and running in a day or two. Not sure when I'll get the other two sites up and running. n the meantime folks can get in touch with me here on Goodreads, through my fiction address, FrankPRyan, also on Goodreads, or through twitter #FPRBooks and #FrankPRyan.

At present attempting to help folks deal with COVID 19. I've revised the Virusphere kindle to take it into the context of the overall understanding of what viruses are, how they infect us and their impact on human evolution and the functioning of the biosphere.

All best,

Frank


Virusphere

My new book, Virusphere, has been recognized internationally as relevant to understanding the COVID pandemic. I am a consultant physician and evolutionary virologist.

This is why I have been asked to help media and readers all over the world to explain and understand what is happening. Virusphere already explained the basis of COVID. But I thought it might help further if I revised the intro and two of the chapters to deal specifically with what is going on. Thankfully, my publisher was helpful and that revised narrative is now available as a kindle on amzon.co.uk. More information is available at www.fprbooks.com.

I would like to thank my editors, Hazel Eriksson and Myles Archibald at Harpercollins and my agent, Jonathan Pegg, for their help in this.

VIRUSPHERE: Ebola, AIDS, COVID-19, and the Hidden World of the Virus.

This paper was produced by Mitsuhiro Yokoyama and others in Japan.

The title of the paper is:

Effects of eicosapentaenoic acid on major coronary events in
hypercholesterolaemic patients (JELIS): a randomised open label,
blinded endpoint analysis

Eicosapentaenoic acid is a key omega-3 only naturally found in fish and fish oil products.

This study involved 18,645 patients, all of whom had high blood cholesterols. They needed a large number to demonstrate significant effect in patients who had no serious coronary artery disease to start with and over the relatively short time period of up to 5 years. All of the patients were already being treated with statins to reduce their blood cholesterol. They were divided into a treatment and control group, with the treatment group given 1800 mg of the omega-3 fatty acid, EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) as well as the statin and the control group given the statin only. Follow-up continued for up to 5 years. But follow-up was deliberately ended in those patients who suffered any specified major coronary event, including the diagnosis of unstable angina (angina thought to be worsening over time), the need for angioplasty (percutaneous operation for narrowed coronary arteries), or coronary artery bypass grafting (open surgery on coronary arteries).

Some 2.8% of patients in the EPA treatment group suffered one of these major coronary events and 3.5% in the control group. In other words there was a reduction of 19% in patients treated with EPA. This is the first high quality well conducted “intervention” study in patients who were also being treated with statins.

Most patients at risk are given statins these days but they are not usually given EPA (or omega-3s) as well. This makes it rather special and something that doctors might perhaps take notice of.

Google the paper title to find the scientific reference to the paper.

I co-wrote the first book ever to introduce the importance of the omega-3s and heart attack prevention for ordinary readers, The title was "The Eskimo Diet" and it was a bestseller in the UK in 1990. I also wrote the much more recent "The Brain Food Diet", which gathered together the information on omega-3s and prevention of mental decline with age.

The latter is now available as an affordable kindle.


The Brain Food Diet

Four different scientific centres worldwide, including my local Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, are involved in a radical new treatment of MS. This treatment is aimed at combating the autoimmune nature of the disease, which involves the body’s immune system damaging the covering sheath, known as “myelin”, which coats nerves within the brain and spinal chord. The new therapy involves administering a drug to encourage stem cells to move into the blood stream from the bone marrow. These are then harvested from the patient's blood and stored. The next step involves destroying the cells in the bone marrow that store the memory of the body’s immune system – in other words the cells that remember how the immune system reacted to foreign invaders, including the mistaken attack on the body’s own myelin. When this is complete, the stored stem cells are reinjected into the patient’s blood, from where they reinvade the bone marrow and, rather like a computer that has been switched off and then on again, they reboot the immune system starting again from scratch. Thus the faulty reaction to the body’s own myelin should in theory be erased.

Does it work?

It’s early days but the preliminary findings in small numbers of patients appears to be promising.

Even if it works, will it prove too costly for the many sufferers throughout the world?
The anti-autoimmune therapy appears to be no more expensive than a single year’s treatment with many of the current oral and injection therapies for MS.

Will it have implications for the many other autoimmune conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, DLE, autoimmune diabetes, and so on?

The answer is it might well prove important – but this remains to be tested.

The Mysterious World of the Human Genome

There has been a remarkable experiment that might, in time, offer treatment of the hereditary aspect of many different and important diseases.

For most of my professional life I regarded the human genome as unalterable in any living person's lifetime. This is now changing. In my book, The Mysterious World of the Human Genome, I suggested that we are on the threshold of a "golden age" of genetics and genomics. It hasn't come about through any single breakthrough but through a series of breakthroughs in understanding.

Most important of these was solving the various mysteries of our human genome, in which only 1.5% of our total DNA codes for proteins. So what is the huge remainder doing? How come almost half of our DNA is either directly derived from the genomes of retroviruses, or somehow linked with and probably also derived from more ancient viruses? We are still working on this but now we know that the viral component is not junk, but is playing important roles in our genetics, biochemistry and physiology. Indeed, until three or four years ago there was yet another huge chunk of our DNA that had an entirely unknown function. But now we know this is part of the mysterious epigenetic system - the master controllers of how the entire system works.

So fathoming how all of this works as an extraordinary and integrated system was a key step.

This enabled us to see how the genome of a single fertilised cell, or a very early embryo, might be altered, so the alteration could enter every living cell of the subsequent individual that developed from that fertilised cell or embryo. But how could any technique change the genome of a fully developed human being, with all of his or her complexity of cells, tissues and organs?

In fact several breakthroughs are now making important inroads into this seemingly impossible quest. One such breakthrough is that viruses can have their genomes edited so they target a specific cell, tissue or organ. Another is the introduction of techniques, such as CRISPR - I won't bother explaining what the acronym stands for - which can enter the genome of the targeted cell, tissue or organ and cut out a tiny fragment of damaged or mutated DNA, leaving the cells own DNA repair mechanisms to close the gap at the point of the excision.

In recent months American scientists have done exactly this in mice bred to suffer from the human version of a type of muscular dystrophy, known as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. In boys suffering from this sex-linked disease, there is a mutation in the protein called dystrophin, which strengthens muscle fibres. Scientists have injected a virus carrying the CRISPR instructions to cut out the defective portion of the gene in the mice, and it appears to have helped the mice to perform tasks of muscle strength.

Of course this is only a tentative first step. There will be new steps, improvements on the basic methodology, and perhaps soon trials of this, or other gene-altering treatments, of hereditary diseases - we doctors call them "inherited disorders of metabolism". It's no longer speculative. It's going to happen - and soon. We really are entering that golden age I predicted in my book.

For more detail see the first class article by Jocelyn Kaiser in Sciencemagazine.

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/20...






The Mysterious World of the Human Genome

A viral disease new to humanity has emerged in the Middle East and is potentially lethal. It's called the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, or MERS-CoV. It causes severe respiratory disease, with coughing, high temperature and shortness of breath - the sort of symptoms we see in pneumonia. So far, all cases of MERS have been linked through travel to or residence in countries in and near the Arabian Peninsula. The largest known outbreak of MERS outside the Arabian Peninsula occurred in the Republic of Korea in 2015. The outbreak was associated with a traveller returning from the Arabian Peninsula.

There is no vaccine to date and no specific treatment, though no doubt trials will be taking place of antiviral drugs. Otherwise patients are treated by isolation and intensive therapy support. So far some three out of four cases have resulted in death.

The CDC has issued a summary that can be found here:

http://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/a...

I travelled extensively to research emerging viruses back in the 1990s and wrote a book, Virus X, on this theme which was an Amazon.com bestseller. The emergence of the MERS-CoV is illustrative that the problem hasn't changed or gone away. This is why I recently released the book as a kindle.

Virus X