Published on 02/16/2021 at 6:55 p.m.
Updated 02/16/2021 at 8:14 p.m.
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As the UN predicts “more frequent and deadlier” pandemics, could the solution come from the past? This is partly what the Russian state laboratory Vektor hopes. He announced on Tuesday that he was embarking on a search for viruses dating from the Paleolithic, working from tissues of animals from that time that have been preserved in ice. “The employees of the Vektor research center want to find paleoviruses that will allow the development of paleovirology in Russia to start and leading-edge research in the field of the study of the evolution of viruses,” said this large laboratory in a statement, specifying that the project is carried out in collaboration with the University of Yakutsk.
According to Vektor, this work “will make it possible to assess the diversity of microorganisms, whose DNA and RNA could be conserved in the material under study.” It will also “determine the epidemiological potential of currently existing infectious agents”, according to the same source. The first tissues were extracted from a prehistoric horse almost 6,500 years old and discovered in 2009 in Yakutia, a vast Siberian region where remains of Paleolithic animals, including mammoths, are regularly found. The project also plans to study the tissues of mammoths, elks, dogs, partridges, various rodents, hares and other prehistoric animals, according to Vektor. “These are discoveries which have been made over the past 10 years, but which have only been the subject of bacteriological studies. We are conducting studies on paleoviruses for the first time”, underlined Maxime Tcheprassov, chief from the laboratory of the Mammoth Museum at Yakutsk University, cited in the press release.
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A former center for the development of biological weapons in Soviet times, the Vektor laboratory, located in the Novosibirsk region of Siberia, is one of only two structures in the world to contain the smallpox virus. It also contains, among other things, the Ebola virus. Vektor has developed a vaccine against the coronavirus, EpiVacCorona, licensed in October in Russia and scheduled to begin mass production in February. In early February, the Sputnik V vaccine was deemed very effective, according to results reported by The Lancet, a leading medical journal.
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