Ott Lab News

A while ago, some researchers had suggested that blocking a set of proteins, known as bromodomain and extraterminal (BET) proteins, might be a way to fight COVID-19. However, in a surprising study, scientists at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF) discovered that BET proteins are actually crucial for the body to fight infection. In fact, the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself blocks the proteins to try to gain an advantage and continue to spread.

Researchers in San Francisco discovered new characteristics of the highly transmissible omicron variant.

ABC7 News reporter Luz Pena went inside the Gladstone Institutes lab where scientists say their discovery is shedding light on why vaccinated and boosted are getting infected.

This past winter, the Omicron variant surged through the country, causing a wave of COVID-19 cases. Now, several months later, those affected are left with a nagging question: how protected am I from future variants? This question is particularly germane as another variant, BA.2.12.1, is causing a recent spike in cases. Now, a team of researchers may have an answer.

COVID-19 infections continue to rise, driven by new and more infectious omicron subvariants, waning immunity from both vaccines and previous infections and fewer people masking up, health officials said at a White House briefing Wednesday.

About a third of Americans now live in an area with medium or high COVID-19 rates, with reported cases up 26% from last week, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control an Prevention.

As the Omicron wave subsided in the United States earlier this year, many experts anticipated a sort of reprieve. We certainly weren’t done with Covid, but perhaps we would get a well-deserved rest.

That break seems to be over.

An increase in infections that began in places including the Northeast and Puerto Rico is now being seen in other parts of the country. Cases will rise and fall going forward, but more worryingly, hospitalizations have started to increase as well — up 20% over two weeks. The decline in deaths has bottomed out at some 350 a day.

In clinical trials, multiple leading COVID-19 vaccines were tested as a two-shot regimen. In the real world, three doses have proven to offer strong protection against serious illness. And now, in multiple countries, fourth doses are being explored as a way to ward off waning immunity.

So does that mean you should rush out and get another shot if the opportunity arises? Not necessarily.

The human immune system is a broad, multi-faceted defence network. It starts off rather immature in your infancy, typically sharpens as you age, and tends to struggle more to fight off pathogens in your golden years.

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.

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.

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.