Westin Hotel, Cape Town, South Africa 17-21 April 2023 In June 2021 the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) announced the establishment of a Technology Transfer Programme for mRNA vaccines in South Africa. The centre to enable this was to be hosted by Afrigen Ltd, the Biovac Institute and the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), and would share technology and expertise with another 14 biomanufacturing partners distributed among low and middle-income countries (LMICs), in a hub-and-spoke model. The Programme has four main objectives: To establish or e ..read more

In August 2019, Kattie Washington of Elsevier’s Cambridge MA office wrote to me to inform me that Alan J Cann had declined to develop the 7th Edition of his long-running franchise, and had suggested that I revise it instead. This was most unexpected and a signal honour, as I was of the opinion since the 1st Edition (in 1993) that this was the first Virology textbook that organised things they way I had in my lectures since the early 1980s – that is, he described viruses and how they work in a comparative way, from first encountering a host cell, through replication and expression, to exiting t ..read more

A strange thing happened to me at the end of February: I got banned from Twitter FOR LIFE. Yes, for LIFE: @edrybicki, my handle for 12+ years and which has 4000-odd followers, is no more. How, you ask? After all, I’m not a malignant orange narcissist, or someone guilty of war crimes, or someone who peddles lies about vaccines or diseases, or threatens violence to all and sundry. Except, according to Twitter Central, I AM that last thing. Some context here: my long-time Twitter and social media friend Ian Mackay put up the next in a long series of cat pictures that he takes in his garden, while ..read more

A group of researchers who claimed in a preprint a while ago that they could show integration of SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences into the genome of cultured human cells has now doubled down, with a Proc Natl Acad Sci paper (!!) further claiming proof of ability to insert in cultured cells, and of proof of insertion in patient tissue. The authors were investigating their hypothesis that inserted fragments of viral genomes that were not infectious, were responsible for the phenomenon of prolonged positive PCR tests in patients who had completely recovered from COVID-19, and who did not shed infecti ..read more

This is a condensation / concatenation of a series of 13 tweets put up recently by someone who tweets as “The Immunologist” with the handle @eclecticbiotech. I was impressed enough by it that I thought it deserved to be all in one piece – and he agreed. He also declined any more accreditation, saying only “No credit necessary. This thread is entirely due to the important work carried out by fellow scientists”. A thread on antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) in coronaviruses from The Immunologist. While developing vaccines, treating patients with convalescent plasma, and considering immunity ..read more

Plant-Made Vaccines and Therapeutics I have published a number of reviews on plant-made vaccines (see below), and our Biopharming Research Unit (affectionately known as “The BRU”) has been very active in this research area for nearly twenty years now. The theme running through all our publications is always “Plants are a cheaper, faster, safer and more scalable means of producing pharmaceutically-relevant proteins than any of the conventional expression systems…” Since 2003 we have published 50-odd articles on plant-made recombinant proteins, including human and animal vaccine proteins and enz ..read more

I see, in my travels through TwitterSpace (thanks @evelienadri!) that the ICTV is mulling a major rework of virus taxonomy – and that they’re wanting, among other things, to have a binomial nomenclature system, like cellular organisms work some Latin into it. A downloadable paper on this is provided here. Now as a sometime Study Group Chair (two different groups of plant viruses; Bromoviridae and Geminiviridae), member of a third (Potyviridae) and longtime member of (since 1987) and contributor to the ICTV, I am frankly aghast that we are revisiting territory that we left behind more than fift ..read more

I discover to my annoyance that the Apple Store changed the access URLs to my two ebooks without informing me – so I am re-advertising them here. Who knows, I may get more sales! Influenza is available in the US Store via this link; Discovery of Viruses via this one. Please buy: you’ll be funding my impending retirement ..read more