#1 men’s tennis player Novak Djokovic and his wife Jelena purchased an 80 percent stake in Danish biotech company QuantBioRes in mid-2020, with the company researching a ‘universal’ treatment for Covid-19, company filings show.
The small, Soborg-registered company, which has 11 employees across Europe, and whose other owners include UK and Serbia-based investors, is said to be working on using ‘Resonant Recognition Model’ technology for its treatment, and plans to start clinical trials this summer in the UK.
“In the case of coronaviruses spike glycoprotein, which is first to attach to host cell membrane, initiating the infection, is the most relevant target for design of vaccine. To be able to design a universal vaccine for all coronaviruses, we will identify a common characteristic parameter for spike proteins from different strains and then use this parameter for vaccine design. For that purpose, we will utilize the Resonant Recognition Model (RRM), which proposes that protein biological function is characterized by certain periodicities (frequencies) within distribution of free electron energies along protein. The RRM is capable of identifying common characteristics for proteins having the same biological function/interaction, but not necessarily having high level of homology. We have previously successfully utilized the RRM model in analysis of HIV virus, where we have identified common RRM characteristic for all different and very variable strains of HIV virus. Based on this characteristic we have designed and experimentally tested peptides that will be used in universal vaccine for all HIV strains.”
Pointing out that coronaviruses are retroviruses, which insert copies of their genome into the DNA of host cells they invade, the company suggests that "the best chance to prevent and find a cure for the infection is to attack it at the very early stage by protecting viral RNA to be transcribed," in this case by interfering with and "attacking" the function of argonaut proteins - "highly specialized binding modules that accommodate the small RNA component and coordinate downstream gene-silencing events by interacting with other protein factors," using RRM.
QuantBioRes's explanation, published in mid-2020, predicted, successfully, two problems faced by governments around the world in attacking Covid-19: the fact that lockdowns leave large parts of the population uninfected and therefore unimmunized, and that existing vaccines are unlikely to be effective against hundreds of potential coronavirus mutations which were already identified at the time.
"Our method of creating a revolutionary and novel approach (overcoming mutation problems) will create a possibility to generate universal treatment for all retroviruses," the company concluded.
Ivan Loncarevic, the company’s CEO, coauthored a paper entitled “Possibility to Interfere with Coronavirus RNA Replication Analyzed by Resonant Recognition Model” in the International Journal of Sciences, an open access, peer-reviewed journal, in June 2021.
QuantBioRes’s filings do not specify how much Djokovic spent for his and his wife’s 80 percent stake in the company. The couple has yet to comment on the matter publicly.
Djokovic has not been vaccinated against Covid and believes it to be a matter of personal choice. His battle with Australian authorities has garnered the tennis star global attention. The tennis star was deported from Australia on Sunday, but received a hero's welcome after returning to his native Serbia. He is now threatened with missing out on tournaments in Spain, France and the United States as health authorities show no signs of bending their Covid jab rules for him.