20 - 025 HeLa an immortal cell line.

 In 1965 HeLa cells were used to create the first human-animal hybrid by fusing HeLa cells with mouse embryo cells allowing for the mapping of genes in specific chromosomes that lead eventually to the Human Genome Project and thus the definition of the Digital Human.

The HeLa is named after the first two letters of the patients first and last names so in this case Henrietta Lacks lead to the naming of this immortal cell line. More about Henrietta Lacks later.  

The HeLa cell line is the oldest and most commonly used immortalised human cell line. These cells that have been kept alive and allowed to reproduce over many years and will continue indefinitely to reproduce into the future provided they are looked after by research laboratories. These are cells kept “in vitro” meaning in glass colloquially called “test tube experiments”. Although it can make use of a variety of laboratory equipment to store them in ranging from test tubes, flasks, vats, petri dishes and microtiter plates. Components of a living organism are isolated from their normal biological surroundings. These can be microorganisms, cells or biological molecules.

This leads to a branch of biological science informally known as omics where the suffix – omics is added to the end to form genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, foodomics, transcriptomics and glycomics. The suffix ome is used to address the objects of study of such fields such as genome, proteome and metabolome. The “ome” indicating the whole thing. Bioinformaticians and molecular biologists focus upon the objects ending in “ome”.

The significant thing was the HeLa cell was digitally mapped so its precise structure could be viewed like you would view computer code. It was a particularly aggressive cancer cell having a very fast rate of reproduction. The cancer is triggered by the human papillomavirus virus which causes a cell to mutate to become cancerous. Now Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccines have been developed and are used preventing 70% of these cervical cancers taking hold.

This blog is not looking at this scientific detail today but at the source of the HeLa Immortal Cell Line. It was an African-American woman called Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) whose cells from a cervical cancer tumour biopsied by the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, USA that started this cell line. Unfortunately the cancer was to cause her death in 1951.

Read the detail about Henrietta Lacks at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta Lacks

Now this whole subject had a very low media profile until in 2000 the author Rebecca Skloot documented extensive histories of both the HeLa cell line and the Lacks family. This was then followed in 2010 by the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and then a film based upon the book in 2017.

Read up more detail at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca Skloot using the links within this post to investigate further.

So after 69 years the cells in Henrietta Lacks cervical cancer tumour are still living and reproducing in research labs across the world. In fact it has been recently used in the search for the coronavirus vaccine.

 

20 - 024 First Coronavirus Vaccine

 Whilst I am not a Donald Trump enthusiast he did have a sharp decisive, if slightly random mind, on some subjects and a very cut down basic use of language. So in his much ridiculed speech announcing there would soon be a disinfectant to kill the virus it turns out this was not too far from the truth. With the dictionary definition that a disinfectant is a substance that destroys harmful germs Trump probably for those not wanting any more detail got it exactly right. In fact the likely first approved coronavirus vaccine is a bit like a disinfectant in that it does essentially a teaching job by teaching the human defence systems how to spot and kill these coronaviruses. So our defence system becomes the true disinfectant doing the killing job but only after the vaccine has acted as a safe decoy allowing our own defence systems to get some training and practice in place on locating it and destroying it.

So Uger Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, the German- Turkish couple, working at their Biontech Biotechnology Laboratory in Germany partnered with the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer to develop their cancer cell killing coding techniques across into the realm of destroying viruses. This approach in terms of virus vaccine creation is revolutionary. I believe one other vaccine is adopting a similar approach with many of the others dependant on mutants of existing biological cells which is the normal vaccine creation approach. The so called monkey cells being on a similar branch of the Darwin Evolutionary Tree of Life to ourselves.

So the vaccine is a set of synthetically created genetic instructions telling cells to make viral proteins that prime the immune system to go into attack and destroy mode. This is called the mRNA vaccine type which are made from synthetically created nanoparticles. The approach is similar to the genetically synthesised products now used to treat diabetic patients. Your system gets a dose of this “coronavirus” look alike which causes your immune to prepare the defences to deal with it. When a real coronavirus arrives it is ready prepared and quickly goes into attack mode. Using the term “look alike” suggests some sort of visual identification and unfortunately with all the media showing the coronavirus looking like a sphere with with spikes attached (which it does under an electron microscope) you can start to think incorrectly. Remember everything is based upon chemical chains, think (Chemical Period Table), which can be digitally represented. So the chemical chain of the new coronavirus vaccine is similar to the chemical chain of the real biological coronavirus. Obviously the vaccine is not living but the cells in the immune system that attack it are living. Once “pre-programmed” it is these living cells that will go onto to kill the real coronavirus. It is the chemical make up of the spikes that is providing the ideal "target" for the immune system anti-bodies to identify it as an intruder cell. So the focus of the vaccine is to have this chemical make up within it and then success is dependant on the degree to which it is identical to the chemical makeup of a real coronavirus spike. 

 The treatment of diabetes is now dependant on techniques similar to that being applied to the new coronavirus vaccine to produce synthetic insulin. The original insulin was harvested from pigs and cattle which had the high potential to be infected and thus a risk to the patient. It is now created from a human gene for insulin synthesis and cutting and pasting this into the generic code of the E coli bacterium. This genetically modified bacteria is then grown in vat’s and the insulin harvested off them. So digitally change the recipe and then grow the insulin. So initially the crude techniques that were used to create Genetically Modified (GM) wheat and rice (so called golden rice) have now been upgraded to operate on the Digital Human re-programming our immune system to spot and kill the coronavirus.

So Donald Trump calling it a disinfectant was probably not too far off the mark.