Monthly Archives: June 2020

Job number ACAD104563Division/School School of Cellular and Molecular MedicineContract type Open EndedWorking pattern Full timeSalary 33,797 - 38,017 per annumClosing date for applications 02-Jul-2020

We wish to recruit a Research Associate to be part of a multidisciplinary team investigating and evaluating new approaches to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection in resource-limited settings.

The post is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and will be held jointly between the Schools of Physics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine (CMM) and is a collaboration with the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI). The post is available for 18 months with potential funding from the 1st August 2020.

The key duties for the postholder will be to generate and characterise a series of modified superparamagnetic nanoparticles (SPIONs) based upon ferritins, and investigate their interactions, and those of a related series of derivatised fluorescent carbon dots (FCDs) with target Mycobacteria. The RA will produce, and subsequently derivatise, recombinant ferritins; characterise these materials using biophysical approaches including electron microscopy, light and X-ray scattering, and superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometry; and investigate their interactions with target bacteria. The successful applicant will also be expected to prepare applications for time at the Diamond Light Source and other large scale facilities elsewhere in Europe.

Candidates should have a PhD in a Physical (Chemistry, Physics) or Life Sciences (Biochemistry, Microbiology) discipline awarded or soon to be awarded; or equivalent professional qualification/experience. They should have a strong background in recombinant protein production and characterisation and/or in biophysics/soft matter physics methods. Moreover the successful candidate will be passionate about interdisciplinary working, able to communicate clearly and effectively across a diverse team, be willing to contribute to the scientific direction of the project and disseminate its outputs and have excellent organisational skills.

For informal enquiries please contact Dr Annela Seddon (Annela.seddon@bristol.ac.uk); or Dr Jim Spencer (jim.spencer@bristol.ac.uk).

We welcome applications from all members of our community and are particularly encouraging those from diverse groups, such as members of the LGBT+ andBAME communities, to join us.

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Research Associate, School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine job with UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL | 209066 - Times Higher Education (THE)

Have you ever heard that taking vitamin D supplements or following a ketogenic (keto) diet will protect you from the new coronavirus? In this Special Feature, we explain why these and other persistent myths are not grounded in science.

Even before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, their director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned of the danger associated with spreading false information about the virus.

At a conference on February 15, 2020, he declared that were not just fighting an epidemic; were fighting an infodemic.

Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous, he emphasized.

However, it can be difficult to tell what is credible and what is not given the sheer quantity of information that people are sharing both on and offline.

Previously on Medical News Today, we compiled a list of 28 myths surrounding the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). In this Special Feature, we will take an in-depth look at five more persistent myths and explain why people should not take them at face value.

Some articles claim that if a person takes vitamin D supplements, they will be less likely to contract SARS-CoV-2.

In part, people have based these claims on a controversial paper that appears in the journal Aging Clinical and Experimental Research.

The papers authors claim to have found a correlation between low mean levels of vitamin D in the populations of certain countries and higher rates of COVID-19 cases and related deaths in those same countries.

Based on this correlation, the authors hypothesize that supplementing the diet with vitamin D may help protect against COVID-19. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this would actually be the case.

In a rapid review of the evidence published on May 1, 2020, researchers from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom unequivocally conclude: We found no clinical evidence on vitamin D in [the prevention or treatment of] COVID-19.

They also write that [t]here was no evidence related to vitamin D deficiency predisposing to COVID-19, nor were there studies of supplementation for preventing or treating COVID-19.

Other researchers who have conducted reviews of the existing data surrounding a potential relationship between vitamin D and COVID-19 agree.

One report by specialists from various institutions in the U.K., Ireland, Belgium, and the United States which appeared in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health in May 2020 also points to a lack of supporting evidence in favor of taking vitamin D supplements to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2.

The reports authors warn that:

[C]alls [for high dose vitamin D supplementation as a preventive strategy against COVID-19] are without support from pertinent studies in humans at this time, but rather based on speculations about presumed mechanisms.

They also note that although sufficient vitamin D can contribute to overall good health on a day-to-day basis, taking supplements without first seeking medical advice can be harmful.

For example, taking too much vitamin D in the form of a dietary supplement could actually jeopardize health, especially among people with certain underlying chronic conditions.

Another widespread rumor is that taking zinc supplements could help prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2 or treat COVID-19.

It is true that zinc is an essential mineral that helps support the functioning of the human immune system.

Starting from this notion, a team of researchers from Russia, Germany, and Greece hypothesized that zinc might be able to act as a preventive and adjuvant therapeutic for COVID-19. Their results appear in the International Journal of Molecular Medicine.

The researchers refer to in vitro experiments that apparently showed that zinc ions were able to inhibit the action of a certain enzyme that facilitates the viral activity of SARS-CoV-2.

However, they also point out the lack of actual clinical evidence that zinc might have an effect against SARS-CoV-2 in humans.

Other papers that cite the potential of zinc as an adjuvant in COVID-19 therapy including one that appears in Medical Hypotheses are more speculative and not based on any clinical data.

In a Practice patterns and guidelines paper from April 2020 which appears in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health nutritionist Emma Derbyshire, Ph.D., and biochemist Joanne Delange, Ph.D., reviewed existing data about zinc (alongside other nutrients) in relation to viral respiratory infections.

They found that, according to available research in humans, zinc supplementation may help prevent pneumonia in young children, and that zinc insufficiency may impair immune responses in older adults.

However, they note that there is not enough evidence about the role of zinc supplementation in preventing viral infections in general.

Rigorous trials [] are yet to determine the efficacy of zinc supplementation, they write.

Vitamin C is another essential nutrient that has received a lot of attention. Many people believe that it can prevent or even cure the flu or common cold.

Although it is true that sufficient vitamin C can help support immune function, current evidence regarding its effectiveness in treating or preventing colds and influenza is limited and often contradictory.

Despite this, there have been claims that this vitamin might help fight infections with the new coronavirus.

It is possible that people are basing these claims on an existing ongoing clinical trial in China, which is looking at the effects of high dose intravenous (IV) vitamin C on hospitalized patients receiving care for severe COVID-19.

The researchers expect to complete the trial by the end of September 2020. No results are available in the interim.

Commenting on the trial, experts from the Linus Pauling Institute which focuses on health and nutrition at Oregon State University in Corvallis explain that although high dose IV vitamin C might help alleviate COVID-19 symptoms in severely ill patients, regular vitamin C supplements are very unlikely to help people fight off infections with SARS-CoV-2.

The experts warn that IV vitamin C is not the same as taking vitamin C supplements, as they would never raise blood levels of this vitamin as highly as an IV infusion would.

They also warn people who may be tempted to up their dosage of vitamin C of the fact they could end up taking too much and experiencing adverse side effects.

Keto diets, which are high in fats and low in carbohydrates, have also received some attention in the context of treating or preventing COVID-19.

This may be because there is some evidence to suggest that keto diets could help boost the immune system. However, much of that evidence is based on animal studies rather than human trials.

Also, an upcoming clinical trial from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, proposes to look at whether or not a ketogenic intervention might help intubated COVID-19 patients by reducing inflammation.

The intervention would necessitate the administration of a specially devised ketogenic formula through enteral feeding. It would be a last-resort procedure for those in a critical condition.

There is currently no evidence to suggest that following a keto diet could help a healthy person prevent or treat infection with SARS-CoV-2.

However, there is evidence to suggest that keto diets can expose people to certain health risks such as by raising cholesterol levels. Keto diets may also have side effects, such as flu-like symptoms, headaches, nausea, and changes in blood pressure.

There are also claims suggesting that various herbal medicines might be able to fight off the new coronavirus.

This may partly be based on a statement issued by a Chinese official in April 2020, suggesting that certain herbal drugs could help treat COVID-19, as a communication in The Lancet on May 15, 2020, reports.

Author Yichang Yang from the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China warns that people should take encouragements to use herbal remedies in the treatment of COVID-19 with a pinch of salt.

Yang warns that herbal remedies including the drugs that the Chinese official names can have unexpected risks and may not be as effective as some people claim. Also, evidence from human trials is very limited.

For similar reasons, he also notes that the mechanisms through which herbal drugs work on the body are often unclear, which may mean that they are not always safe.

A mystery herbal cure for COVID-19 on sale in Madagascar a herbal tea made from artemisia plants has also spurred worry among specialists, who say that the remedy may do more harm than good.

Matshidiso Moeti, director of WHO Africa, has also commented on this:

We [the WHO] would caution and advise countries against adopting a product that has not been taken through tests to see its efficacy.

Although people may be tempted to try anything and everything in the face of such a threat to health as SARS-CoV-2, the most important preventive step is to follow official national and international guidelines for public health, as well as individual health advice from doctors and other healthcare professionals.

For more information on the new coronavirus and how to stay safe during the pandemic, take a look at the information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the WHO.

For live updates on the latest developments regarding the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, click here.

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5 false claims about coronavirus remedies and why they are wrong - Medical News Today

The Great Covid R&D Collaboration - Cooperation accelerating drug development

Pharma battles coronavirus with a mega-collaboration; its own health requires competitive balance.

Pharmas search for a vaccine or drug to prevent/treat Covid-19 has fostered collaboration among companies on an unprecedented scale.The new business model brings together the best minds in the industry to compress into months the search for a drug or vaccine and subsequent clinical testing that typically take decades.While there is no guaranty that any of the candidates chosen will achieve a timely cure, the scale of the effort has led even conservative experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci to predict that a vaccine could be available as soon as yearend, compared to the current world record of six years for the Ebola vaccine.

The worlds expectations pose a serious challenge for pharma.Industry observers, like Bernard Munos and Jack Scannell, have documented a decades long decline in productivity.One might reasonably ask, if collaboration is able achieve these results in a crisis, could it do the same against the major diseases, like cancer and Alzheimers disease, which together kill more each year than Covid-19?Could a cooperative industry be more productive than a competitive one?

The Power of Collaboration

In the last eight months the pandemic has emerged with stunning suddenness to infect more than 6.5 million people world-widekilling nearly 400,000.Cambridge University estimated that losses over the next five years would total nearly $27 trillion, more than 5% of global GDP.As the world hopes for salvation, how pharma responds will have a profound effect on its future.

Though related to predecessors like SARS and Ebola, the CoV2 virus has a unique structure and genetic signature that will likely require new medicines from an industry with an unimpressive track record at innovation.The era of modern molecular medicine began only 40 years ago and is still in relative infancy.Over the last five years, pharma have brought to market an average of 44 new drugs, costing over $2.5 billion each and many taking more than a decade.Pharma will need all their collective wisdom and resources to stop this viral firestorm before it runs is course.

In response, industry leaders have created a mega-collaboration within the commercial research community.Safi Bahcall, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explained that nearly all the major players in drug discovery and development have[established an] insider-only collaborationcalled Covid R&Dto accelerate creation of a vaccine or cure.In these unprecedented discussions, sworn competitors have shared proprietary data from promising drug candidates that they ordinarily would guard like prized jewels.Representatives of the Food and Drug Administration have even joinedto offer assistance.

With businessmen and attorneys out of the room, scientists across the industry can identify and advance projects at rates far faster than any single group. We dont need four companies with four versions of the same drug running redundant clinical trials at the nations hospitals, yet thats what we have today. In normal times, thats how business is done. But these arent normal times. Either industry leaders should empower their consortium to decide which companies should sacrifice their redundant programs, or the federal government should step in and do it for them.

Tahir Amin, Co-Executive Director of Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge and Rohit Malpani, former policy director for Medecins Sans Frontieres, writing in STAT, claim that pharma could be better prepared for pandemics and more responsive to global health-care needs, if existing research [took] place in a more open and transparent manner, even if it is protected by intellectual property. The pharmaceutical industry sits on libraries of patented molecules and research, some of which originates [sic] from public funding, but which is [sic] not developed unless market opportunities arise.[In the case of remdesivir a] more transparent and open science platform could have motivated broader research participation earlier and potentially saved valuable time andimproved collective understandingof the drug.

The Problem With Collaboration

The Covid R&D collaboration focuses, not on drug discovery per sethere is no time for thatbut on selecting or modifying the best of candidates already on the market or in development and accelerating their path to the bedside.This is engineering on a grand scale.But can it help with invention, which is needed to sustain the industry in normal times? Are the competitive friction and apparent inefficiency of business-as-usual impediments to progress or essential elements in a productive commercial ecosystem?

While required in a crisis, cooperation fails as a sustainable foundation for the pharmaceutical industry, because it dilutes incentive and does not support the quantity and diversity of research required for a strong, responsive industry.Innovation does best with many competing high-risk, high-reward projects, rather than a single coordinated effort.Competitive costs are more than covered by the value of the breadth and flexibility of the industry that a collaboration eliminates in the interests of speed.

Drug development is experimental innovation, based on trial-and-error.In a world where nine-candidates-out-of-ten fail in clinical trials and only one-in-five approved drugs is a commercial success, researchers do not know what will work against CoV2 or any pathogen.When outcomes cannot be predicted in advance, likelihood of success is proportional to the number of candidates tested and the degree to which they are differentiated from one another.

In the collaboration, senior team members set an agenda based on their expert judgment, narrowing the range of research to accelerate the development of a few of the most promising candidates.In the case of Covid-19, it means picking winners without clinical or market data, i.e. guessing.

With Covid the strategy has a good chance of yielding results, because the technology for targeting viruses is relatively advanced; the target is well characterized and, according to Michael Farzan at The Scripps Research Institute, more druggable than most targets; the timeframe is short; the scope is enormous, encompassing many candidates; and the cost of failure or delay is so high that it justifies massive spending, regardless of risk.

The problem for innovation is not in streamlining but making decisions based on expert opinion.A 2013 article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery showed that the single factor that correlated most closely with success in drug development was managements willingness to kill candidates early, based on data.The Covid R&D alliance has no choice but to rely on judgment, given the timeframe.In contrast, normal drug development is true scientific research.Knowledge evolves through the Darwinian selection of candidates, based on experimental outcomes.Failures play at least as important a role as successes in guiding development.Second-tier performers may find uses in other indications.Knowing only what works gives developers no indication of where to go next when they encounter a block.An unexpected toxicity can eliminate an entire generation of drugs with a similar mechanism.

Expert opinion is not a substitute for the time and cost of competitive studies.Rather than choosing winners, researchers should aggressively cut weak performers early in development.By testing more drugs, more quickly with greater diversity, developers can improve productivity.

Though the scale of the collaboration can reduce the risk somewhat with more shots-on-goal, the lack of time diversification limits the technological base to the ideas and molecules available at the moment, excluding newer, untested and often unorthodox approaches.Should the current solutions prove inadequate, the collaboration would essentially have to start over.

If It Looks Like Collaboration

The threat of consensus thinking doesnt require the formal structure of a collaboration.The infatuation of the industry with the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimers disease caused a similar narrowing of the industry focus to a single idea.Pharma has spent well over a decade and billions on the assumption that amyloid plaques and tangles caused the disease but have no approved products or even positive clinical results to show for the effort.Rather than assuming that the experts knew the answer, despite having no data proving causation, the industry would have been better served by testing as many different hypotheses as possible.With the presumed mechanism a bust, the industry have few promising alternatives and are essentially back where they were 10 or more years ago.

Contrary to Amin and Malpani, forcing access to proprietary molecules and data would not accelerate a treatment for Covid and would compound the collaboration problem longer term.Without the results of the phase II trials, it is unlikely that, out of hundreds of potential projects, investigators would have chosen in advance to work on remdesivir, a drug that had failed in HCV and Ebola and may offer only limited protection against Covid 19.Making available proprietary data that Gilead had spent tens of millions to acquire, along with the rights to the molecule, would destroy any incentive to invest in early stage research.

The commercial innovation machinery with all its redundancy and friction has provided a remarkably quick initial responselittle more than 8 weeks after the declaration of the pandemic, the FDA issued an emergency use authorization for remdesivirand set the stage for a more complete solution in the coming months.With ninety vaccines of eight different varieties in clinical trials as reported by Nature at the end of May and more on the way, competitive excess has enabled the industry to mount a robust response to Covid threat.One hopes it will be enough.

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The Great Coronavirus Collaboration And The Future Of Drug Discovery - Forbes

People with blood type A may be more at risk of serious forms of the coronavirus, new research has shown.

The study, by researchers in Germany and Norway but not yet published in a journal, is the latest to show that people with this particular blood type may be more susceptible to the disease.

The researchers found two points in the human genome which were associated with an increased risk of respiratory failure in patients with Covid-19. One of these points is the gene that determines blood type.

Having type A blood was linked to a 50 per cent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need oxygen or go on a ventilator, the researchers found.

However, Andre Franke, professor of molecular medicine at the University of Kiel and lead author of the study, said it was not certain whether it was the blood group that determined whether someone would become more seriously ill, or the genetic marker.

We cannot disentangle yet whether actually the blood group is the risk or some genetic variants that are linked to the blood groups. Using the blood groups as proxies, we estimate a 50 per cent higher protection for [blood type] O and a 50 per cent higher risk for A, said Prof Franke.

Researchers took blood samples from 1,610 patients in hospitals in Italy and Spain who needed oxygen or had to go on a ventilator. They extracted DNA and scanned it using a technique called genotyping.

They then compared these findings with 2,205 blood donors who did not have Covid-19.

They then looked at the DNA of the Covid-19 patients to determine if they shared any of the same genetic code.

Separate studies from China and the United States have also shown that people with blood type A are more susceptible to the disease than those with type O, the more common blood type.

And during the 2002 to 2003 epidemic of Sars - the coronavirus most closely linked to Covid-19 - researchers also found that those with type A blood were more likely to contract the disease.

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People with blood type A more likely to suffer severe coronavirus symptoms, research finds - Telegraph.co.uk