• Potential Drug Treatment Starts U.K. Trials

    A drug that could help treat coronavirus is to be trialed on a small number of patients in England and Scotland.
    The studies, which have been fast-tracked by the government, will initially involve 15 NHS centers.
    The BBC reports that in the absence of a known treatment for the virus, a handful of experimental drugs are being tested globally.
    The drug, known as remdesivir, is manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Gilead.
    Two studies are to be carried out in the UK - one on patients with moderate symptoms, and one on those who are in a serious condition.
    Trials are already underway in China and the US, with the first results expected in the coming weeks.
    The UK trials will be based in England and Scotland and overseen by Dr. Andrew Ustianowski, a consultant in infectious diseases.

  • COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator Awards $20 Million to Fund Clinical Trials

    The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, a global initiative launched in March by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard, has announced three grants totaling $20 million in support of efforts to identify repurposed drugs and immunotherapies for COVID-19.

  • “Pandemic Drone” to Detect Coronavirus

    A “pandemic drone” to remotely monitor and detect people with infectious respiratory conditions is being developed. The drone will be fitted with a specialized sensor and computer vision system that can monitor temperature, heart and respiratory rates, as well as detect people sneezing and coughing in crowds, offices, airports, cruise ships, aged care homes and other places where groups of people may work or congregate.

  • An Experimental Peptide Could Block COVID-19

    In hopes of developing a possible treatment for Covid-19, a team of MIT chemists has designed a drug candidate that they believe may block coronaviruses’ ability to enter human cells. The potential drug is a short protein fragment, or peptide, that mimics a protein found on the surface of human cells. Anne Trafton writes in MIT News that the researchers have shown that their new peptide can bind to the viral protein that coronaviruses use to enter human cells, potentially disarming it.
    The MIT team reported its initial findings in a preprint posted on bioRxiv, an online preprint server, on March 20. They have sent samples of the peptide to collaborators who plan to carry out tests in human cells.

  • Race against Time: The Complex Task of Developing a Vaccine against the New Coronavirus

    University of Munich virologist Gerd Sutter talks about the complex task of developing a vaccine against the new coronavirus – and the approach he has adopted, which is already being tested against the related coronavirus MERS. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 40 projects are already underway with the aim of producing a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. Sutter’s comments: “Yes, a lot of things are now happening. Among them are projects which, like ours, are inspired by the protective effects of the MERS vaccine, but other vector-based approaches are also being tried. Then there is a whole series of projects that involve the use of nucleic acids, such as those being pursued by Moderna or by CureVac in Tübingen. At this point, it’s important to make use of all available technologies. If you asked me a year ago, I would have said that we would be very pleased if it took less than 2 to 3 years to get from the discovery of a new virus to a Phase-I trial of a new vaccine. Now, we can probably reckon with a year or thereabouts.”

  • In the Fight against Coronavirus, Antivirals Are as Important as a Vaccine

    While many scientists are working on developing a coronavirus vaccine, others are busy testing antiviral drugs. Lisa Sedger writes in The Conversation that vaccines are generally only effective when administered prior to infection, but antiviral agents are important because they can treat people who already have COVID-19.
    Sedgernotes that chloroquine, a well-known anti-malarial drug, has also gained attention. One study tested it together with a broad-spectrum antibiotic azithromycin. While some COVID-19 patients in this small study recovered, other patients died (despite chloroquine treatment), and some patients ceased treatment for a variety of reasons – including the severity of their symptoms.
    “Nevertheless, people are interested in how chloroquine and azithromycin might work for coronavirus. Chloroquine exhibits antiviral activity and is currently used to treat autoimmune diseases because it also has anti-inflammatory properties,” she writes. “Azithromycin is an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections, but it, too, exhibits antiviral activity, including against rhinovirus that causes the common cold. Chloroquine might need to be given early after infection to be most effective against coronavirus.”

  • Century-Old Vaccine Investigated as a Weapon Against Coronavirus

    A vaccine that’s been used to prevent tuberculosis is being given to health-care workers in Melbourne to see if it will protect them against the coronavirus. Jason Gale writes in Bloomberg that the bacillus Calmette-Guerin, or BCG, shot has been used widely for about 100 years, with a growing appreciation for its off-target benefits. Not only is it a common immunotherapy for early-stage bladder cancer, it also seems to train the body’s first line of immune defense to better fight infections.
    The World Health Organization says it’s important to know whether the BCG vaccine can reduce disease in those infected with the coronavirus, and is encouraging international groups to collaborate with a study led by Nigel Curtis, head of infectious diseases research, at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne.

  • U.S. Pharmaceutical Giant Says COVID Vaccine Could Be Ready for Emergency Use by Early 2021

    U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson says human testing of its experimental coronavirus vaccine will begin by September and says the vaccine could be available for emergency use by early next year.  

    The company said Monday that it has jointly committed more than $1 billion to develop and test a vaccine along with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It said if human trials of the vaccine are successful, it is prepared to produce more than 1 billion doses of the vaccine. 

  • Uncertainty about Facts Can Be Reported Without Damaging Public Trust in News: Study

    The numbers that drive headlines – those on Covid-19 infections, for example – contain significant levels of uncertainty: assumptions, limitations, extrapolations, and so on. Experts and journalists have long assumed that revealing the ‘noise’ inherent in data confuses audiences and undermines trust. A series of experiments – including one on the BBC News website – finds the use of numerical ranges in news reports helps us grasp the uncertainty of stats while maintaining trust in data and its sources.

  • Australia: Grim Story of Heat, Drought and Fire

    Record hot weather, drought and a devastating bushfire season in 2019 damaged our environment and natural resources on an unprecedented scale, according to the annual Australia’s Environment Report. “Last year was just another step down on the continuing descent into an ever more dismal future - unless we finally take serious action,” said the lead author of the report.

  • FDA Authorizes 15-Minute Coronavirus Test

    Federal health officials on Friday approved a coronavirus test that can provide results in less than 15 minutes, using the same technology that powers some rapid flu tests.
    Arman Azad writes for, CNN that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the test for emergency use, signaling that federal regulators were satisfied with the test’s validation data and believe its benefits outweigh any risks, such as false positives or negatives.
    The test’s maker, Abbott Laboratories, said it expects to deliver 50,000 tests per day beginning next week. The technology behind the test looks for genes that are present in the virus, similar to PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests already on the market.

  • Blood from People Who Recover from Coronavirus Could Provide a Treatment

    An old idea for fighting infections — an approach most physicians know about only from medical lore — is being revived as people wait for drugs and vaccines to thwart the novel coronavirus. If it works, the blood plasma of people who have recovered from covid-19 would be used to protect health-care workers and help sick people get well.
    Carolyn Y. Johnson and Ben Guarino write in the Washington Post that the possible therapy is based on a medical concept called “passive immunity.” People who recover from an infection develop antibodies that circulate in the blood and can neutralize the pathogen. Infusions of plasma — the clear liquid that remains when blood cells are removed — may increase people’s disease-fighting response to the virus, giving their immune systems an important boost. The approach has been used against polio, measles, mumps and flu.
    The Telegraphreports that blood donated by patients who have recovered from COVID-19 will imminently be used as part of efforts to treat victims of the disease in NHS hospitals,  can disclose. Senior officials said the health service will start giving hospital patients plasma from those who have recovered from coronavirus, “in the very near future”, after the move was approved by the U.K. medicines watchdog.

  • Italy and France Are Now Prescribing Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine as Treatments for Coronavirus Patients

    We’ve been talking about anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for about three weeks now.  However, U.S. health agencies like FDA and CDA, are still very cautious about the effectiveness and safety of the two drugs due to small trial size and lack of sufficient data. Techstartups reports that in France, the government caved to pressure from renowned Dr. Didier Raoult, who led the new additional study on 80 patients, results show a combination of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin to be effective in treating COVID-19. Dr Didier Raoult, a professor of infectious diseases who works at La Timone hospital in Marseille, then declared in a video on YouTube that chloroquine was a cure for Covid-19 and should be used immediately.

  • Identifying Factors Affecting COVID-19 Transmission

    Much remains unknown about how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spreads through the environment. A major reason for this is that the behaviors and traits of viruses are highly variable – some spread more easily through water, others through air; some are wrapped in layers of fatty molecules that help them avoid their host’s immune system, while others are “naked.”
    Rob Jordan writes in Stanford News that this makes it urgent for environmental engineers and scientists to collaborate on pinpointing viral and environmental characteristics that affect transmission via surfaces, the air and fecal matter. Alexandria Boehm, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Krista Wigginton, the Shimizu Visiting Professor in Stanford’s department of civil and environmental engineering and an associate professor at the University of Michigan. co-authored a recently published viewpoint in Environmental Science & Technology calling for a broader, long-term and more quantitative approach to understanding viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, that are spread through the environment. 

  • Coronavirus Treatments and Vaccines – Research on 3 Types of Antivirals and 10 Different Vaccines Is Being Fast-Tracked

    Just three months after China first notified the World Health Organization about a deadly new coronavirus, studies of numerous antiviral treatments and potential vaccines are already underway. Never has science advanced so much in such a short period of time to combat an epidemic.
    Ignacio López-Goñi writes in The Conversationthat many of the proposals now under study come from research groups that have spent years working to combat similar coronaviruses, particularly SARS and MERS. All that accumulated knowledge has allowed scientists to advance at unprecedented speed.
    We know, for example, that the genome of the novel coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, is 79 percent like that of SARS. We know the “key” used by the virus to get into human lung cells is protein S and that the “lock” in the cell is the ACE2 receptor. We also know that the entry of the virus is facilitated by a protease, or an enzyme that breaks down proteins, from the cell itself, called TMPRSS211.