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BOSTON, Dec. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Replikins Ltd. today announced its latest findings regarding the virus replikin count in human H5N1 influenza virus. The company's software-driven analysis has found that the prevalence of these sequences has remained high in Indonesia; in addition, higher counts now have been found in China. These statistics reflect an "upregulation" of this gene which has been linked to the lethality of influenza viruses. When factored in with previous findings, this suggests that the H5N1 outbreak in Indonesia is not over and that the next country to show an increase in human cases and mortality rate will be China.
This is the second of a series of reports on the use of a new methodology to isolate "in silico" and to track and control specific replikin gene activity in several disease states.
A software method, called FluForecast(R), has been designed to measure Replikins(TM), a class of proteins containing high concentrations of amino acids lysine and histidine, that have been determined to be related to rapid replication and virulence. Rather than being evenly distributed in the virus genome, replikins have been found to be concentrated in specific genomic areas. The area of each genome with the highest concentration of continuous replikin peptides has been isolated in silico and named a Replikin Peak Gene (RPG). Using proprietary computer algorithms constructed to identify, count, and track historically this class of proteins, replikins have now been analyzed in 130,488 protein and genome sequences. These include all the accession numbers for common strains of influenza and other lethal virus isolations published between 1917 and 2007 in the PubMed repository. The method is being applied to the diagnostic and therapeutic control of virus and bacterial diseases.
When the replikin count of the SARS virus dropped in 2003, it signaled
correctly that the SARS outbreak shortly would be over. Similarly for each
of the influe
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| SOURCE Replikins Ltd. Copyright©2007 PR Newswire. All rights reserved |