Ott Lab news stories
The attack of the COVID-19 virus on the human heart is completely hidden from view, revealed only by the damage that’s left behind.
But San Francisco scientists have designed a way to witness the assault. In lab-grown globules of throbbing heart cells, they can watch signs of distress, then death.
As the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 continues to sweep through Europe and moves into the Middle East and Latin America, a new variant of Omicron, known as BA.2, is running up case counts in several nations. Denmark has been particularly hard hit with BA.2, which now accounts for over half of all infections in the country. In the United States, hospitalizations remain at high levels even as COVID-19 cases are declining in many of the communities that were hardest-hit by the virus earlier in the pandemic, allowing the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, to relax certain mandates.
Where is this pandemic taking us next?
In the span of just weeks, millions of Canadians became infected with SARS-CoV-2. Globally, more cases were reported in the first 10 weeks after the Omicron variant was identified than in all of 2020.
It was a mass infection event quite unlike anything we’d seen in the pandemic to date, hitting both the unvaccinated and vaccinated — but not in the same way.
While vaccinated and boosted individuals largely avoid dire outcomes from COVID-19, data continues to show that unvaccinated individuals remain at a far higher risk of serious illness, hospitalization, and death.
Two years into the pandemic, and two months into Omicron’s globe-crushing surge, our COVID-19 vaccines are finally on the cusp of a federally sanctioned update. To counter the new variant’s uncanny knack for slipping past antibodies roused by our first-generation shots, Moderna and Pfizer have both kick-started clinical trials to see how Omicron-specific vaccines fare in people. Results are expected within the next few months, and if all goes well, syringes around the world could be locked and loaded with Omicron’s wonky-looking spike protein by the summer.
Omicron-izing our COVID vaccines is a good, if unfortunately timed, move, experts told me. But the same strangeness that makes an Omicron-specific vaccine wise is also a warning against trashing our original-recipe shots too soon. We don’t know what the next major variant will look like. It could be an offshoot of Omicron, something that strongly mirrors the ancestral SARS-CoV-2, or something that resembles neither variant at all.
In late November 2021, scientists reported the emergence of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In a matter of weeks, the variant, dubbed Omicron, spread around the globe.
Today, the Omicron variant accounts for about 98 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the United States, and case counts and hospitalizations are spiking at all-time highs in many places. At the same time, recommendations are constantly shifting about how to prevent COVID-19, and when to isolate or quarantine. Across both social media and mainstream media outlets, conflicting opinions are being raised about what Omicron means for the future of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This week, three virologists at Gladstone Institutes—Warner Greene, MD, PhD, director of the Michael Hulton Center for HIV Cure Research; Melanie Ott, MD, PhD, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology; and Nadia Roan, PhD, associate investigator—discussed what people should know about Omicron, home testing, and more.
Warner Greene, MD, PhD
Director, Michael Hulton Center for HIV Cure Research, Gladstone Institutes
Melanie Ott, MD, PhD
Director, Gladstone Institute of Virology
Moderator: Deepak Srivastava, MD
President, Gladstone Institutes
You wore a mask. You sheltered in place and avoided travel. You got the vaccine. You thought we would soon be on the other side of the pandemic. Then the Delta variant came, and now Omicron.
You, like many others, are starting to wonder, “When will this all be over?”
Gladstone virologists discuss what we know about Omicron and what we might expect in 2022.
Finding the omicron coronavirus variant in San Francisco on Wednesday may have caused concern among the general public, but to the Bay Area scientists eager to study the highly mutated virus and understand the threat it may pose, having a sample in their backyard was a stroke of luck.
In the mad global dash to study omicron, getting copies of the variant to analyze in U.S. labs has been a challenge. Some Bay Area scientists said they’ve been on waiting lists for at least a week — since Thanksgiving, when the variant was first reported out of South Africa.
Infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was once considered a death sentence. Then, powerful antiretroviral drugs were developed and combined to suppress the virus, allowing those living with HIV to have a largely normal lifespan—as long as they take the medications daily.
However, the virus hides out in a latent form in immune cells to evade antiretroviral drugs, and discontinuing these drugs almost inevitably leads to rekindling of active infection. And despite the success of the drugs, they can cause side effects such as inflammation and accelerated aging.
On World AIDS Day 2021, investigators at Gladstone Institutes are aggressively pursuing a broad range of research that could one day help provide a cure for HIV, which now infects an estimated 38 million people worldwide, many of them in developing countries unable to afford or access daily antiretroviral therapy.
In 2011, Dr. Jennifer Doudna began studying an enzyme called Cas9. Little did she know, in 2020 she would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Emmanuelle Charpentier for discovering the powerful gene-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9. Today, Doudna is a decorated researcher, the Li Ka Shing Chancellors Chair, a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Molecular as well as Cell Biology at the University of California Berkeley, and the founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute.
How RNA technology may tip the balance in our favour when it comes to anti-COVID therapeutics as well as vaccines.