It has been nearly a year since the world went into lockdown for COVID-19 and while many have been focused on getting the vaccines out, treating COVID patients, and getting life back to a “new normal”, we at DNALabs have not forgotten about all of our other patients, and the consequences of the continuing lockdown.
The month of January ended with Bell Let’s Talk Day, a day to take action in supporting our mental health while February began with World Cancer day, with the aim to inform and encourage people on its prevention, early detection, and treatment. February is also Heart Month, a time to bring attention to the importance of cardiovascular health, and what we can do to reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease.
Our LoveMyHealth™ PRO has recently been expanded to include sections dealing with risk for heart disease and eating for heart health, while our new expanded drug panels in our MatchMyMeds™ Drug Compatibility Test now covers more commonly prescribed drugs used in the treatment of pain and migraine, oncology, cardiovascular, endocrinology, gastroenterology, immunology, neurology, psychiatry, anti-anxiety/antidepression, and more.
DNALabs is focused on delivering the best science to healthcare professionals and everyday consumer.
Moni Lustig,
Chief Executive Officer
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“Turning Darkness into Light.”
My soon to be 90-year-old dad reminds me regularly, “The real test of a person is not the way they handle the issues that they know are coming, but rather understanding how to react to the moment in a crisis you can never plan for.”
The pandemic that continues to grip our world has had many altering consequences on our well being, both physical and mental that we never planned for. Being shut in as example, has been a crisis for many of us on its own. It has forced us to adapt and modify the way we live, whether we liked it or not. Working from home, exercising at home, try to eat healthy at home has in many ways brought it own shares of issues. Struggling to cope has now been the norm, and along the way many of us have found ourselves coping with a new level of anxiety, depression and stress. Our mental well being has been stretched to limits never imagined.
For some, darkness has been a magnet trap, afflicting pain wantonly. Our DNA team believes in the motto that when you ‘give people light and they will find a way’. The light in fact maybe closer to us then we otherwise realized. For years, our Doctors were unable to pinpoint the best type of anti-depressant class of drugs without compelling their patient to spend months on multiple d rugs ‘trial and error method’ to determine what works best. Science has come a long way and our team has embraced the urgency of doubling down on research on drugs that treat depression so that we are able to expand our list of prescribed medication in our MatchMyMeds™ genetic test panel. Mental illness does not discriminate, either in age, gender or ethnicity. What the pandemic has done is bring the topic of mental illness to the forefront, not with shame but with a clarion call to action.
Give people light. History reminds us that it has been in our darkest moments that we've made our greatest progress. So true in the speed to which a vaccine has been developed. Science is part of a compendium in time which allows us to embrace the future and find new discoveries for a purpose.
Our team at DNA labs is looking across the abyss we are mired in now, so that we can see the other side, and find real solutions to problems our world is now confronted with, and strategies to help us strengthen our path including that for mental wellness. There is a lot of hard work ahead and we will look past these dark moments of early 2021 to find the light again, so see the future again and face our truth again, together with incurable optimism.
Wishing us all good health, both inside and out!
Michael S. Kerzner,
Chief Strategist
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What the heck is an RNA vaccine?
I get this question a lot, so I figured it might make an interesting column. In order to understand what exactly an RNA vaccine is and why it’s so cool, we first have to understand: What is RNA? Like DNA, RNA is a string-like molecule that uses a genetic code and contains instructions for your cells to create proteins. Proteins are the enzymes, receptors, transporters, hormones, etc., which perform essential functions throughout the body and make us who we are. The relationship between DNA, RNA and proteins is referred to as the central dogma of molecular biology, whereby genes are encoded in DNA, transcribed into RNA messages, and finally translated to create the protein encoded by that gene.
DNA → RNA → Protein
As an analogy, your DNA is like a cookbook, whereby each page of the book contains a recipe - i.e., just as each gene in your genome contains instructions to create a protein, each recipe in your cookbook contains instructions to create a meal. Now imagine whenever you have to make a meal, you have to photocopy (or transcribe) the recipe of interest onto another piece of paper. This photocopy is like your RNA, and is translated to create the meal, or protein.
Cookbook → Photocopy → Meal
So what is an RNA vaccine? In order to understand this, we have to understand how a traditional vaccine works. Vaccines work by training your immune system to recognize and mount a response against a foreign invader, like a virus. A traditional vaccine is typically made up of a weakened or inactivated version of the virus that you’re targeting. When introduced into the body, the vaccine teaches the immune system to safely trigger an immune response, and to also remember what the virus looks like in case there is a foreign invasion in the future. Once vaccinated, if the virus does appear in the future, the immune system is already trained to recognize it, and can quickly attack it before it can spread and make you sick.
For Covid-19, instead of injecting an inactivated version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as part of a traditional vaccine, Moderna and Pfizer designed RNA vaccines to target the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein - seen in cartoon images on the surface of the virus. The two RNA vaccines for Covid-19 (from Moderna and Pfizer), contain the RNA that encodes that spike protein. So instead of injecting a dead virus which would contain the actual spike protein into our bodies, we’re injecting the RNA, and then your body translates the RNA to create the spike protein. That spike protein then teaches your immune system that this is what a foreign invader looks like, so it will know to attack if it ever shows up.
What’s so great about RNA vaccines? Creating traditional vaccines by growing massive amounts of a particular virus, and then weakening or inactivating it takes a significant amount of time, measured in years. Whereas producing synthetic RNA can be done significantly quicker… you simply need to know the sequence. So for a situation like a global pandemic, this new RNA technology enabled the creation of vaccines in record time. Once the Covid-19 virus was identified, its genes were sequenced (including the gene that encodes the spike protein), and published on the internet within a few weeks. With that sequence in hand, scientists at Moderna and Pfizer immediately started designing RNA vaccines, and had enough to test in animals within weeks. Incredibly, regulators in the US and UK approved these two RNA vaccines for emergency use just 11 months after the discovery of the virus. Previously, no new vaccine had ever been created in less than four years.
This technology is exciting and can be applied to a variety of other use cases as well. By being able to manufacture RNA, get it into human cells, and have it express the protein encoded, we can theoretically get cells to produce whatever protein we wanted.
One obvious application is for the seasonal flu vaccine. There are many different influenza viruses, they are always changing, and we can’t predict what strain will emerge to be most likely to cause disease next flu season. So each year, a new flu vaccine is made to target three or four of the flu virus strains that are anticipated to be most prevalent in the upcoming flu season. With RNA vaccines, we can wait, and create a vaccine based specifically on the strain of influenza that shows up next season. Another interesting application could be to fix broken genes. Genetic diseases are caused by genetic variants within DNA, which are retained when transcribed into an RNA message that is ultimately translated into a broken protein. This RNA technology could potentially be used to put a fixed version of a protein into someone that otherwise expresses a broken version, which can be a game changer in targeting human diseases and illness.
Dr. Aaron Goldman,
Chief Science Officer
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MatchMyMeds™
MatchMyMeds™ by DNALabs is focused on delivering the best of pharmacogenomics science to the everyday healthcare consumer. This DNA testing tool is your first step to personalized medicine. It informs the right dose and it’s just right for you. It’s precision medicine with your name on it.
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LoveMyHealth™
LoveMyHealth™ by DNALabs is designed to provide insights into the key factors of your health and well-being based on your genomic profile. It empowers you to improve your health and well-being by providing actionable nutrition, exercise and lifestyle recommendations personalized to your unique genetic makeup.
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TestMyTolerance™
Ready for Canada’s legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational use, DNALabs Canada has developed TestMyTolerance™, a cannabis sensitivity test. Informed and responsible use should include your body’s unique response to the various psychoactive and non-psychoactive compounds found in cannabis.
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What is a biological pathway?
Biological pathways are often multifaceted and require some background knowledge in order to understand the principle mechanisms and functions. This series of short topics will give you a better idea of how your genes affects how well your body processes medication. This is the basis for how MatchMyMeds works!
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