Researchers develop killer new COVID strain in dangerous lab experiment

Article content

Researchers in Massachusetts have created a new COVID strain that has an 80% kill rate.

The scientists working out of a laboratory in Boston University infected mice with the new strain, killing 80% of the rodents, the Daily Mail reported.

When a similar group of mice were exposed to the Omicron variant, they all survived and only experienced so-called mild symptoms.

This latest mutant variant is a hybrid of Omicron and the original coronavirus and proves to be significantly more deadly.

The researchers working out of Boston extracted Omicron’s spike protein — the unique structure that binds to and invades human cells — attached it to the original strain and infected the mice with it to see how they would fare.

“In … mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80 percent,” they wrote in their report, according to the Mail.

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video

They added that while the spike protein is responsible for infectivity, changes to other parts of its structure determine its deadliness.

The scientists also infected human lung cells with the hybrid strain and found it was five times more infectious than Omicron, the newspaper reported, suggesting the lab-created virus could be the most contagious variant yet.

The scientists did acknowledge that their man-made virus would be less likely to be as lethal in humans as it was in the mice, due to the rodents not having identical immune responses and most of the same genes are used differently in mice brains versus human brains.

COVID-19 first spread from a wet market in Wuhan, China, which was located near a lab in which its scientists were working on similar viruses involving bats, though studies earlier this year bolstered the theory that the coronavirus emerged from the wild.

Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories is one of 13 biosafety level-four labs in the U.S. that are authorized to handle the most dangerous pathogens.

Experiments at these labs often involve researching how animal viruses can help advance treatments and vaccines that could be used in a future outbreaks.