NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[longfellow95]

Glad it piqued your interest enough for you take a good look!
And it's right up your professional street I believe?
Who did you say you worked for?

So I won't debate the science at the moment. I'll wait until I've reviewed all the available evidence!

But here's a notorious bit which you've probably seen:-

"Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag"

We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are present in all Wuhan 2019-nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose, we used the 2019-nCoV local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and considered hits with 100% sequence coverage. Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins.

And:-

The insertions were observed to be present in all the genomic sequences of 2019-nCoV virus available from the recent clinical isolates (Supplementary Figure 1). To know the source of these insertions in 2019-nCoV a local alignment was done with BLASTp using these insertions as query with all virus genome. Unexpectedly, all the insertions got aligned with Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1). Further analysis revealed that aligned sequences of HIV-1 with 2019-nCoV were derived from surface glycoprotein gp120 (amino acid sequence positions: 404-409, 462-467, 136-150) and from Gag protein (366-384 amino acid) (Table 1). Gag protein of HIV is involved in host membrane binding, packaging of the virus and for the formation of virus-like particles. Gp120 plays crucial role in recognizing the host cell by binding to the primary receptor CD4.This binding induces structural rearrangements in GP120, creating a high affinity binding site for a chemokine co-receptor like CXCR4 and/or CCR5.

And:-

Our results highlight an astonishing relation between the gp120 and Gag protein of HIV, with 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein.

And in their conclusion:-

Our analysis of the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV revealed several interesting findings: First, we identified 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein that are not present in any other coronavirus reported till date. To our surprise, all the 4 inserts in the 2019-nCoV mapped to short segments of amino acids in the HIV-1 gp120 and Gag among all annotated virus proteins in the NCBI database. This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous. Further, 3D modelling suggests that atleast 3 of the unique inserts which are non-contiguous in the primary protein sequence of the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein converge to constitute the key components of the receptor binding site. Of note, all the 4 inserts have pI values of around 10 that may facilitate virus-host interactions. Taken together, our findings suggest unconventional evolution of 2019-nCoV that warrants further investigation. Our work highlights novel evolutionary aspects of the 2019-nCoV and has implications on the pathogenesis and diagnosis of this virus.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full


Seems like they used a similar technique to you but with very different results..
All their sequence alignments are there.

To be fair, they took a pasting from some commentators (below the article), but by no means all.


Do you agree that this is not zoonotic?

I don’t think i’ve ever seen 2 so confused people talk in such an authoritative way about a subject since the last discussion about NWBO on ihub.

Pleased you found them so authoritative!