? Two strains of XMRV in severe ME

Video from the lectures, December 2 in Gothenburg. Lecturer in Swedish Jonas Blomberg, Barbara Baumgarten in Norwegian and Judy Mikovits in English. The video is two hours.

Xmrv Positive:

Partial translation of Judy Mikovits lecture starting where she is talking about the Lo/Alter study @1:31:50 "It's not part of the publication, but Frank Ruscetti - Harvey asked Frank if he would isolate the virus from these patients. He did so and he detected XMRV, suggesting that our cell line preferentially replicates XMRV.

Importantly, Rachel Bagni also showed an immune response in these 9 samples 15 years later.

So, we looked then back at our population knowing these data, and here I'm just illustrating that our population, or a portion of it, had two strains of human gammaretroviruses in that patient population from the original cohort...

Independant cloning of the viral sequences confirms the diversity in our patient population that we saw in Tony Komaroff's patient population and the presence of actually two strains of virus in several of the same individuals.

And this might be a clue to individuals who might be sicker if they have both as opposed to one. So we can study that. This just shows you again that the clones - when we did a lot of clones from this patient - more than 50 cultures into LNCaP, every one of them were XMRV-like, suggesting that XMRV-type virus replicates more efficiently in LNCaP.

So, Rachel Bagni did what's known as a phylogenetic analysis - a tree where you compare the sequences of all the polytropic viruses in green in the gene bank in the data base to the sequences from our patients...And you can see that many of the WPI samples from that original study also contain polytropic sequences. Interestingly, one patient contained what's called a mink cell focus or a modified polytropic virus - much more divergent that some of the other strains.

And this patient also has a different phenotype, a more aggressive disease.

She's sicker, suggesting that maybe the family of viruses can be distinguished and we might not have identified the most pathogenic gammaretrovirus first as we did with HIV and HTLV-1. Both of the "1" strains are the most pathogenic, but there's a lot of research to do to answer these questions on if and how the family members are associated with different severities of disease."

And just as Heidi Bauer reported from the BPAC:
@1:39 "Frank Ruscetti has isolated infectious XMRV from prostate cancer"

Video