Yuri A. Lazebnik received his Ph.D. from St. Petersburg State University and is Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "His research has focused on many aspects of cancer biology, including carcinogenesis, apoptosis, cancer metabolism, genomic instability and aneuploidy, cancer body-to-body transmission, polyploidy, oncogenic viruses, cell-cell interactions, virus-cell, and cell-cell fusion. He is the author 47 scholarly articles, has cited about 21,000 times and has presented in 181 invited lectures. His articles have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Findings, The Scientist, and OncLive." (source)
"Introduction
A hallmark of severe COVID-19 is the abundance of syncytia, the products of fusion between two or more cells in the lungs of patients. These syncytia have been attributed to the ability of spike, a protein encoded by SARS-CoV-2, to fuse cells to each other, and prompted a search for drugs that could prevent this cell fusion...
Cell fusion as a trigger of the blood coagulation cascade
Discovering syncytia in COVID-19 patients led to a suggestion that 'the fusogenic properties of the MERS-CoV- and SARS-CoV-2-infected cells might be linked to the pathogenesis of thrombosis,' a major complication of COVID-19.
What could this link be?
I would like to suggest two candidates: the scramblase activity associated with spike-induced cell fusion and cell death...
Cell fusion and COVID-19 vaccines
The majority of available COVID-19 vaccines, including all four vaccines authorized in the United States and the European Union, work by expressing spike in the cells of the injected individuals. They do so either by infecting the cells with an adenovirus carrying a spike gene (AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines) or by transfecting them with a spike mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna vaccines). Once expressed, spike is recognized by the immune system as a foreign antigen, triggering an immune response to the protein and thus to SARS-CoV-2...
[T]he primary activity of this [spike] protein is to fuse biological membranes, which is why spike expressed in cells can fuse them into syncytia. This fact raises two questions that have yet to be asked despite all the attention and scrutiny that spike has received. Does spike fuse any cells if expressed by the vaccines? And, does this fusion, should it occur, have any unwanted consequences?
Given that spike expressed by SARS-CoV-2 fuses cells in COVID-19 patients, that spike expressed by viral vectors or by transfection fuses human cells in the dish, and that spike fuses cells even if expressed in undetectable amounts, it is reasonable to presume, until proven otherwise, that spike does fuse some cells in the injected individuals.
Could this fusion be pathogenic?
... These observations suggest a relationship between the fusogenicity of spike proteins and the reported incidence of side effects. Is this relationship accidental or causal?
A causal relationship entails two testable predictions:
First, complementing vaccination with drugs that prevent spike-induced cell fusion should reduce the incidence of complications, particularly for the AstraZeneca vaccine and other vaccines that express wild type spike. A number of approved drugs that have such activity, including hotly debated ivermectin, have been already identified by Braga and colleagues...
If, as intended, the vaccine stays strictly intramuscular, the syncytia it creates may be inconsequential as they stay at the site of injection and die in due course. However, if a vaccine spreads systemically because it is accidentally injected into a blood or lymphatic vessel, or for other reasons, the outcome would depend on which cells, where, and in what numbers begin to express spike and thus acquire the ability to fuse."
Copyright: © 2021 Lazebnik. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.