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It took ten minutes for billionaire Stein Erik Hagen to realize that the research was worth funding.
When the coronavirus occurred in Europe in March, Tom Henning Karlsen, a professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oslo, had an idea.
– While our colleagues from Italy and Spain received a large number of patients with covid-19 who were placed in the corridors of hospitals where they fought between life and death, we had plenty of capacity. So we wanted to start a project to discover the big question that many of us asked ourselves: “What’s so special about this disease?” He tells forskning.no.
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Ten minutes
What is special about covid-19, according to several researchers and specialists, is that patients have fallen ill in a way never before recorded. You can go from a completely normal state to lying on a ventilator in the intensive care unit for a few hours, according to Karlsen.
To further investigate the course of the disease, the Norwegian researchers joined with some German colleagues and contacted Stein Erik Hagen. The businessman is known, among other things, for having previously supported medical projects.
In fact, the billionaire’s financial aid would take much faster than an application for funding to the Research Council.
– It took about ten minutes before we said yes. It’s the fastest research grant we’ve ever received, says Karlsen.
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Posted in record time
Then it passed quickly before nearly 100 local doctors in Italy and Spain contributed the recruitment of nearly 2,000 patients with severe coronary disease.
The samples were then sent to Norway and Germany for analysis, where variations in the genes of infected patients were mapped with genes from the general population.
Less than three months after the study began in March, the first scientific article appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. According to forskning.no, it typically takes several years for such research to be published in other countries.
The results show that some genes have twice the risk of becoming seriously ill with COVID-19 than others.
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Neanderthal Kobling
According to Karlsen, this doesn’t sound all that impressive in terms of numbers, “but in a genetic sense the difference is very big.”
Researchers have also discovered that the genome in question originally existed among Neanderthals, which have later spread to various current population groups.
– We expected to find something in the genes that makes some people much sicker than others, researcher Trine Folseraas from Oslo University Hospital told NRK earlier this summer.
In another study, published by the journal Nature, British researchers have found four new genes that are more likely to become seriously ill from the coronavirus.
These, on the other hand, are more difficult to interpret, since some have to do with the immune system, while others are in defense of the virus.
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