Vaccine to cure body odor?

There could be a vaccine for everything. Scientists are working on personal vaccines, vaccines reducing body weight or narcotic dependence, vaccines for just about anything.  Can there be a vaccine improving body odor? Certainly, and it could target not only bacteria (in body crevices) worsening odor, but also molecules responsible for odor. This would be a very complex task, however, as there is still a lot we don't understand.  For example, if metabolism and microbiomes leading to body odor cause similar reactions to already existing vaccines. 

Several vaccines to prevent COVID-19 were authorized for emergency use and hundreds of millions doses have been administered. 2 millions of vaccinated individuals in the US completed a health survey in the 7 days following their vaccination via the v-safe app.

This table shows top adverse reactions reported to the first two vaccines authorized in the US. Hundreds of social media groups on Facebook, reddit and WhatsApp are also flooded by descriptions of adverse reactions and immunity related events. What is missing? The ability to systematically analyze all these reactions in different health and neighborhood communities.

We started such a study in one neighborhood community and would like to also conduct it in the MEBO/PATM communities. We are also opening it to MEBO friends and family - asking them to indicate their relationship with MEBO/PATM in the comment section of the survey.

We are also collecting COVID-19 experiences in different groups of people, analyzing infectious disease susceptibility risks. 

in English: https://bit.ly/BTN-eng

en Español: https:/bit.ly/BTN-esp

Thank you for your help!

REFERENCES

ClinicalTrials.gov [Internet]. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US). 2021 April 6 - . Identifier NCT04832932, The COVID-19 Back-to-Normal Study [cited 2021 April 7]; Available from: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04832932

Chapin-Bardales J, Gee J, Myers T. Reactogenicity Following Receipt of mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccines. JAMA. 2021 Apr 5. doi: 10.1001/jama.2021.5374. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33818592. 

Zimmermann P, Curtis N. Factors that influence the immune response to vaccination. Clinical microbiology reviews. 2019 Mar 20;32(2). 

Mosquera MJ, Kim S, Zhou H, Jing TT, Luna M, Guss JD, Reddy P, Lai K, Leifer CA, Brito IL, Hernandez CJ. Immunomodulatory nanogels overcome restricted immunity in a murine model of gut microbiome–mediated metabolic syndrome. Science advances. 2019 Mar 1;5(3):eaav9788.

Bandaru P, Rajkumar H, Nappanveettil G. The impact of obesity on immune response to infection and vaccine: an insight into plausible mechanisms. Endocrinol Metab Synd. 2013;2(2):1000113-22. 

Kim YH, Kim JK, Kim DJ, Nam JH, Shim SM, Choi YK, Lee CH, Poo H. Diet-induced obesity dramatically reduces the efficacy of a 2009 pandemic H1N1 vaccine in a mouse model. Journal of Infectious Diseases. 2012 Jan 15;205(2):244-51. 

 Monteiro MP. Obesity vaccines. Hum Vaccin Immunother. 2014;10(4):887-95. doi: 10.4161/hv.27537. Epub 2013 Dec 23. PMID: 24365968; PMCID: PMC4896563. 

Ozgen MH, Blume S. The continuing search for an addiction vaccine. Vaccine. 2019 Aug 23;37(36):5485-90. 

Daniel W, Nivet M, Warner J, Podolsky DK. Early evidence of the effect of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine at one medical center. New England Journal of Medicine. 2021 Mar 23.

The Many Genes of TMAU

Twenty years ago Trimethylaminuria was linked to mutations in the FMO3 gene. It turns out there are many more genes that can lead to this condition. 

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Unraveling the Mysteries of Mischievous Microbiome

Science explains why some people smell worse than others despite keeping themselves squeaky clean.


  
The body is crawling with microbes that have evolved with the person, depending on the innate metabolism, history of infections, microbiome swaps, diet and lifestyle. The body's ecosystem of microorganisms can increase the risk for dangerous diseases for which we have unreserved levels of sympathy. It can also lead to ​unlikable conditions such as unpredictable and embarrassing outbursts of odor emitting through the pores - odor so bad it ruins social lives and careers.

Let those who never smelled bad cast the first stone

Analysis of our metabolism is crucial to comprehending the responses of our genes and microbes to the stresses of daily life, and to elucidating the causes and consequences of health and disease.

We applied metabolomic approach to an elusive condition that has always evaded diagnosis: socially and psychologically distressing odors that occur without a known or apparent cause. Learn about our preliminary results and participate in our anonymous survey to help us better understand and help with this condition.

Of blood and breath: metabolite-based diagnosis of ovarian cancer

Physicians always knew that breath contains clues to diseases. Chemicals in breath often correlate with chemicals in saliva and blood - be it alcohol, anaesthetics or other metabolites (see, for example, this study by Dr Andreas Hengstenberg).

As one of my interests is breath-based detection of ovarian cancer, I took note of the recent paper claiming 99% to 100% accuracy of detecting ovarian cancer by metabolites in blood.
The authors used customized functional support vector machine-based machine-learning algorithms to classify thousands of metabolites measured by mass spectrometry (JEOL AccuTOF™ DART® that allowed to forego conventional liquid chromatography as sufficient resolution was achieved without separation) in peripheral blood. 

100% sensitivity and 100% specificity was achieved with 64-30 split validation technique, while 100% sensitivity and 98% specificity was the accuracy of leave-one-out-cross-validation. Very large number of metabolites, from 2,000 to 3,000 features, contributed to such discriminatory power (see the list of 14,000+ in supplemental material) 
 

Set of 25 canonical metabolic pathways relevant to the uploaded elemental
formulae ranked according to their p-values (hypergeometric distribution).

Histamine, amino acid, fructose and glucose metabolism were among the most prominent processes discriminating cancer and healthy blood.
It's that simple: sugar feeds cancer. Scientists have long found that cancer cells slurp fructose, and that fructose intake can be linked to some cancers. Histamine/polyamine interplay in cancers is also known. Histamine may be involved in inhibition of the local immune response against cancer. Is amino acid metabolism also linked to cancer? Well, what is not.   




Metabolomic biomarkers were always known to have diagnostic potential - cholesterol and glucose are among the oldest and most widely performed diagnostic tests. Yet, most bleeding edge cancer detection platforms are genomic or proteomic in nature.  Of the thousands of known biomarkers, only a handful have made it into the clinic. Existing ovarian cancer tests mostly rely on detecting a protein -  carbohydrate antigen 125. Vermillion's OVA1 and HealthLinx OvPlex tests use five proteins. This may be extended to 7.

Metabolites represent the end products of the genome and proteome, thus metabolomics-based diagnostics  holds the promise of providing powerful diagnostics,  allowing for differentiation of increased and decreased levels of chemicals with low process coefficient of variation.


Metabolomic tests were used for medical diagnostics starting with Hippocrates and Lavoisier. They continue to be explored by modern scientists. Dr Michael Phillips, for example, developed HeartsBreath Test, approved by the US Food and Drug Agency for early diagnosis of heart transplant rejection. Research proved the potential of inexpensive breath tests in discriminating lung, breast, colon and prostate cancers. Let's hope the new article  - along with others - will lead to novel consumer products, not only more academic research and peer-reviewed publications.



Zhou M, Guan W, Walker LD, Mezencev R, Benigno BB, Gray A, Fernández FM, & McDonald JF (2010). Rapid Mass Spectrometric Metabolic Profiling of Blood Sera Detects Ovarian Cancer with High Accuracy. Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention : a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, cosponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology PMID: 20699376