Category Archives: Molecular Medicine

Lab tests and clinical pilot study

In test tubes and 3D-human miniature livers, the researchers showed that the drug inhibited signaling of cytokines, immune system-proteins known to overreact and drive inflammation in severe cases of COVID-19 infection. It also helped reduce the viral load of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and the level of the signal molecule interleukin-6 (IL-6), a predictor of mortality from acute respiratory distress syndrome associated with COVID-19.

In addition to the lab tests, a small pilot study of three men and one woman with bilateral COVID-19 pneumonia was conducted in Milan, Italy. After 10-12 days of treatment with baricitinib, all four patients showed improvements in signs and symptoms such as cough, fever and reductions in viral load and plasma IL-6 levels.

Collectively, these data suggest that baricitinib may lower inflammation and viral load in COVID-19, says Ali Mirazimi, adjunct professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, who led the functional virus studies.

Additional trials of baricitinib are currently underway in 85 hospitalized COVID-19 patients across three hospitals in Northern and Central Italy, with encouraging initial results in patient outcomes, according to the researchers.

We are integrating and carefully analyzing these trial data and providing functional and mechanistic follow-up studies to scrutinize baricitinibs mode of action, says Volker Lauschke, associate professor of personalized medicine and drug development at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, who led the functional testing of baricitinib.

The study was funded by Eli Lilly and Company and the Sacco Baricitinib Study Group. Several of the authors reported potential conflicts of interests, including employment and shareholdings in Eli Lilly and Company, which owns the trademark for the baricitinib drug Olumiant. For a full list of disclosures, please see the full article.

Reference:Stebbing, et al. (2020) Mechanism of Baricitinib Supports Artificial Intelligence-Predicted Testing in COVID-19 Patients. EMBO Molecular MedicineDOI:10.15252/emmm.202012697

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Rheumatoid Arthritis Drug Could Be Repurposed To Treat COVID-19 Patients - Technology Networks

The paper also suggests the likeliness of the gut microbiota being disrupted in severe COVID-19 patients, which may affect disease outcomes, including predisposition to secondary bacterial infections of the lung.

Jose Bengoechea, Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Director of Wellcome Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine at Queen's University, explains: "The lack of therapies to treat severe COVID-19 patients led clinicians to use a number of treatments to modify the activity of their immune system.

"However, it is important to note that these interventions may also increase the risk of potentially fatal secondary bacterial respiratory infections.

"Therefore, careful consideration should be given whether any potential new therapy may affect the patients' defences against bacterial infections. We believe that there is an urgent need to develop new therapeutics to treat COVID-19 targeting the virus/bacteria co-infection scenario."

The research also raises concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) globally.

See more here:
COVID-19: Researchers warn of sharp rise in antimicrobial resistance - National Herald

NEW YORK While some potential vaccines have emerged in the global race to find a way to stop the spread of COVID-19, many scientists and researchers believe antibody based therapies hold great promise for treating people already infected with the disease.

HOW DO ANTIBODY THERAPIES WORK?

These therapies use antibodies generated by infected humans or animals to fight off the disease in patients. They date back to the late 19th century, when researchers used a serum derived from the blood of infected animals to treat diphtheria.

For COVID-19 treatment, researchers are studying the use of convalescent plasma and other treatments made with blood from recently recovered patients.

More recently, scientists have developed treatments called monoclonal antibodies -- antibodies that can be isolated and manufactured in large quantities to treat diseases like Ebola or cancer. Companies, like Eli Lilly and Co and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in the United States, are trying to use this approach to develop their treatments.

Unlike convalescent plasma, manufacturers do not need a steady supply of antibody-rich blood to produce monoclonal antibodies, so this approach could be easier to scale up.

HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT FROM VACCINES?

In general, the goal of a vaccine is to generate an immune response that can prevent someone from getting ill with a disease, whereas antibody-derived products are generally designed to treat disease.

And while some drugmakers have suggested antibody treatments can be used prophylactically - Regeneron's Chief Scientific Officer George Yancopoulos has said their treatment could be a bridge to a vaccine - it could be expensive.

"You might go into nursing homes or the military and use it because antibodies have a pretty long half life," said Dr. Betty Diamond, Director of Molecular Medicine at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research.

"You might decide that you are going to use this as a prevention in this very high risk group, but you wouldn't do that for the whole country."

The amount of protein in antibody drugs makes the treatment more expensive than vaccines in general, Feng Hui, chief operating officer at Shanghai Junshi Biosciences, said.

Designing antibody drugs to treat or protect high risk people, including those with weak immune systems, could require hundreds, or even over a thousand times more protein than found in a vaccine shot, according to Junshi.

WHO IS DEVELOPING ANTIBODY THERAPIES FOR COVID-19?

Eli Lilly is collaborating with Junshi and Canadian biotech firm AbCellera Biologics to develop different antibody treatments, both of which have started early stage testing in humans.

Regeneron plans to start clinical studies later this month to test its antibody cocktail treatment, which was derived from antibodies from genetically-modified mice. It aims to have hundreds of thousands of preventative doses available "by the end of the summer or the fall."

The CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance, which includes Japan's Takeda Pharmaceuticals and CSL Behring, is working on hyperimmune globulin therapy derived from convalescent plasma, which could offer a standardized dose of antibodies and doesn't need to be limited to patients with matching blood types.

The Antibody Therapy Against Coronavirus (ATAC) project, funded by the European Commission and led by Sweden's Karolinska research institute, is looking at a similar approach as well as monoclonal antibodies. Under the project, monoclonal antibodies extracted from convalescent plasma are now being tested on human volunteers in Germany and on animals in Switzerland.

Britain's GlaxoSmithKline is working with Vir Biotechnology Inc to develop potential antibody treatments which select the best antibodies out of the plasma.

AbbVie has also announced a collaboration to develop antibody therapies.

Singapore's state research body A*Star is working with Japan's Chugai Pharmabody Research on an antibody for clinical use.

(Reporting by Michael Erman; Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio in Brussels, Roxanne Liu in Beijing and John Geddie in Singapore; Editing by Miyoung Kim & Simon Cameron-Moore)

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Explainer: What Are Antibody Therapies and Who Is Developing Them for COVID-19? - The New York Times

Arsenicum album 30C (Aa30C) is a homeopathic drug that Indias Ministry of AYUSH prescribed through an advisory on March 6, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In section i. Preventive and prophylactic and sub-section Homoeopathy, the ministry advised the recommended dose thus: Arsenicum album 30, daily once in empty stomach for three days.

To make the drug, a mother tincture of the medicine is first made by dissolving by arsenic trioxide in a mixture of glycerine, alcohol and water or sometimes by heating arsenic with water. One millilitre of this tincture is diluted with 99 ml of water plus ethyl alcohol, and given a few machine-operated, moderate, equal and successive jerks, called succussions. This leads to a 100-fold dilution. The process is repeated 30-times to produce the final product, of 30C potency. A few drops of this, loaded on sugar pills, is administered to an individual. Apparently, each dilution plus succussion step makes the formulation more potent, and the process is called potentisation.

Starting with a mother tincture that has 200 grams of arsenic trioxide in 1 litre of liquid, the 30C potency medicine has one molecule of the active material present in a volume equivalent to that of 1 million Suns. In terms of the active material, an individual is consuming zero molecules.

However, this should not surprise us. Homeopathy was first proposed in Germany by Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) as an alternate medicinal strategy, more than 200 years ago. This was a time when the chemistry to show the above effect was not known (now it is in school textbooks). This was also an era where orthodox medicine was crude, often involving blood-letting. Compared to this, homeopathy seemed safe and humane. But today, when science has since made numerous strides, it is problematic that homeopathic principles still evade the rigours of scientific questioning.

From nothingness to water memory

Homeopathy takes recourse in the notion that water, when it comes in contact with the active material, develops molecular memory. In the absence of this active material in the final formulation, it is this memory-laden water that triggers an immune response in the human body. Note that the active material arsenic, in this case is chosen based on the homeopathic law of similars, i.e. a substance that induces the symptoms of a disease.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence of water having any kind of memory. Even the journal Nature was touched by this controversy. It should also strike us that if water remembered what it touched, it would have lots of memories of anything it touched.

Any scientific response to such lack of evidence should be rigorous experimentation to demonstrate effects, or the lack of it. However, the actual response to any critique of homeopathy has often been that science does not know everything yet.

The quest to explain how homeopathy works has also led to hypotheses that suggest the active material somehow survives in even the most dilute homeopathic medicines. Here, the original active material finds its way into the final drug via interaction of the drug and bubbles formed during succussions. However, the methods used in the study are not standard for potentisation. The physics of bubbles catching the active material is unclear, and control experiments like checking for contaminants were not performed.

More importantly, even if traces of active material are present, how do they trigger physiology to act against an external agent (like the novel coronavirus)? We dont know. For a chemical to be accepted as a drug, it takes years of experimentation, involving laboratory experiments, animal trials and human trials over multiple phases. But proponents of homeopathy have claimed that it cannot be subjected to such trials because it provides highly individualised doses. However, the mass distribution of Aa30C is anything but individualised.

Most popular narratives on homeopathy consist of anecdotes and scientific-sounding terms like vital force or biphasic actions. Hahnemann himself explained that homeopathy worked through a dematerialised spiritual force.

We also hear things like a thousand people were given this medicine and then 95% did not get the disease, so it works. This is not what a trial is and these experiments are worthless unless compared with 1,000 people who are given placebos (i.e. blank doses).

The fact that homeopathy thrives is not proof of its efficacy just like the existence of tarot readers and astrologers does not prove that these practices have any scientific basis.

Homeopathy puts on an aura of respectability thanks to scientific journals from major publishers that cater to it.

Many reputed institutions have looked at the available literature and their conclusions are unequivocal. The US National Institutes of Health say, Theres little evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment for any specific health condition. The UKs National Health Services (NHS) state, Theres been extensive investigation of the effectiveness of homeopathy. Theres no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition.

A report prepared by a committee appointed by the UK parliament in 2010 called the British governments position on homeopathy confused and recommended that the government stop funding homeopathy on the NHS. The report argued that homeopathy undermines the relationship between NHS doctors and their patients, reduces real patient choice and puts patients health at risk. Since 2017, the NHS has severely restricted access to homeopathy.

After an extensive literature survey, Australias National Health and Medical Research Council concluded in 2015 that there was no reliable evidence from research in humans that homeopathy was effective for treating the range of health conditions considered: no good-quality, well-designed studies with enough participants for a meaningful result reported either that homeopathy caused greater health improvements than placebo, or caused health improvements equal to those of another treatment.

Also read: Will COVID-19 Change AYUSH Research in India for the Better?

A false shield

A much-quoted statement by the WHO sometimes distorted during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 said, In the particular context of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, it is ethically acceptable to offer unproven interventions that have shown promising results in the laboratory and in animal models but have not yet been evaluated for safety and efficacy in humans as potential treatment or prevention (emphasis added). However, the words in bold are often omitted in public statements, such as in the AYUSH ministry advisory.

All the hype and publicity surrounding Aa30C have set the stage for people to desperately chase what they think is a wonder drug. Clarifications of the type issued by the AYUSH ministry, stating that their recommendation is only in the general context or that it is only for add-on preventive care, is like water off a ducks back. Panic-buying of Aa30C has already been reported. News of random, untracked distributions by various agencies and buyers flocking to pharmacies to buy the concoction at inflated prices continue to pour in.

The problem is significant because people are likely to believe that by imbibing this medicine, they have just acquired a shield against the COVID-19. A corporator in Mumbai mentioned that some people, when questioned about their being out during a lockdown, said that they had taken Arsenicum album. They believed that they would now be immune to the disease.

Anurag Mehra, Supreet Saini and Mahesh Tirumkudulu teach in IIT Bombay.

Read more:
A Homeopathic Defence Against COVID-19 Is No Defence at All - The Wire

Estonian scientists are developing a DNA-based method of analysis that enables them to identify food components and specify the origin of a foodstuff.

Bioinformatics specialists at the University of Tartu, in cooperation with the Competence Centre on Health Technologies, have published a research paper in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science in which they indicated the possibility to identify components in thermally processed food using DNA analysis even if the quantities were very small. The scientists analysed thermally processed cookies that contained a small amount of lupin flour. The DNA analysis provided reliable identification of lupin even when the lupin flour content in the dough was just 0.02%.

Food always contains the DNA traces of the plants, animals and microorganisms that have been used or that the food or its raw materials have come into contact with in the production process. DNA analysis can provide valuable information on the content, origin, safety and health benefits of food and will make the identification of counterfeit foods and non-compliances in the ingredients specified on the packaging more reliable in the future. For example, certain cases gained attention last year in which the origin of honey and the authenticity of Estonian honey needed verification. The novel DNA analysis would make it possible to solve such issues.

According to Kairi Raime, the lead author of the article, Research Fellow of Bioinformatics at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology and a doctoral student at the University of Tartu, their method is a major step forward in the development of DNA-based methods for food analysis. Our method helps to identify the actual biological contents and origins of food via DNA information and thus ensures the safety and authenticity of the food, she explained. Raime is planning to defend her PhD dissertation on the topic.

The DNA may be significantly degraded in processed food. Scientists extracted DNA from the cookies and analysed it using DNA sequencing technology. For the analysis of a single biscuit, approximately 20 million DNA sequences were obtained. Based on these, and by using bioinformatic analysis, it was possible to specify the DNA of the species found in the sample analysed. The main issue was the preparation of the DNA for sequencing, as the DNA is often degraded in food and even minute amounts of DNA molecules must be identified.

Kaarel Krjutkov, Head of the Precision Medicine Laboratory of the Competence Centre on Health Technologies and Senior Research Fellow of Molecular Medicine at the University of Tartu, whose laboratory was used to prepare the sequencing of the DNA extracted from the biscuits, noted that faking the DNA fingerprint of a food is complicated and expensive, and it is therefore cheaper to offer authentic food. People can see that in medicine, precise DNA analysis is already a reality, but in food industry and in the field of food safety, the golden age of DNA-based analysis is yet to come, Krjutkov remarked.

The research used a method based on short, unique DNA sequences (k-mers) for analysing genomic DNA data, which enables the scientists to quickly identify plant or bacterial DNA present in a food or an environmental sample. The Chair of Bioinformatics at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Tartu has been developing competence in the bioinformatics of k-mers and DNA analysis over the last five years. The software developed in the Chair of Bioinformatics has been used both in medicine and for providing food safety.

The article authors earlier cooperation resulted in the NIPTIFY foetal chromosomal disorder test, which helps to detect, with almost 100% accuracy, the DNA sequences causing foetal Down syndrome in the mothers blood sample as early as the tenth week of pregnancy. The genome analysis method developed in the Chair of Bioinformatics is used to identify pathogenic bacteria, specify their disease-causing capabilities and predict antibiotic resistance. This enabled Maido Remm, Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Tartu, and his working group to advise the management board of a production company contaminated with a dangerous strain and to help determine the spread of type ST1247 in the company during the listeria outbreak in autumn 2019.

According to Remm, the research article proves that DNA sequencing can also be used for identifying allergenic ingredients in processed food. DNA sequencing is a promising diagnostic method which makes it possible to quickly obtain precise information about food and the microbes around us, he said. The use of sequencing and k-mers makes it possible in a very short time to implement a diverse range of diagnostic tests that meet the needs of researchers and companies.

Read this article:
Novel DNA analysis will help to identify food origin and counterfeit food in the future - Baltic Times

This story appeared in the July/August 2020 issue as "A Dog's Life."Subscribe to Discovermagazine for more stories like this.

Matt Kaeberleins search for the secret to a long life began, in part, with 560 unique strains of bakers yeast.

He noticed that some of the strains with the greatest longevity tended to divide in slow motion. And he found that this slowdown, which takes place in the molecular mechanisms controlling cell division, could be tinkered with artificially by feeding the yeast a drug called rapamycin.

As he began publishing his results in 2006, other researchers were finding that the drug most commonly used to prevent rejection of organ transplants in humans had a similar anti-aging effect in worms and flies. Several years later, a landmark paper in Nature showed that rapamycin could increase the lifespan of middle-aged mice by 9 to 14 percent.

Veterinarian Kate Creevy (with Poet and Bandana) is one of the co-leaders of the Dog Aging Project. To participate, dogs visit the clinic regularly for checkups. (Credit: Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences)

By then a professor of pathology at the University of Washington medical school,Kaeberlein found these results both tantalizing and frustrating. There would appear to be molecular processes that are shared in the aging process cross lots of different organisms, he says. That means, in theory, a chemical like rapamycin should therefore also prolong the lives of people. But itd be hard to confirm: Humans live such a long time that it would take at least a generation to find out. What he required was a test subject that approximated humans biologically, but with a much shorter lifespan.

An intriguing solution came up in 2011 in a conversation with biologist Daniel Promislow, who would soon become a new colleague and, like Kaeberlein, was a dog owner. Considering that canines have an average life expectancy of about a decade, everyday exposure to a human living environment and natural susceptibility to many of the same frailties as humans from heart disease to cancer Promislow, who was already working toward starting aging studies in dogs, commented that pooches might just be a pathologists best friend. And pathologists could return the favor by helping to extend pets lifespans, a treat for anyonewho has a dog.

Veterinarian Kate Creevy and Rudy during a regular checkup. (Credit: Amber J. Keyser)

Kaeberlein decided to join in. Launching the Dog Aging Project late last year, with $23 million in funding from the National Institute on Aging, he, Promislow and their colleagues got 80,000 responses to their call for canine volunteers.

By then, their ambitions had expanded considerably. For most of his career, Promislow had wondered why larger dogs live shorter lives. It got me interested in thinking about dogs as a model for aging, he says. Looking at the relationship between dog size and lifespan might be a way to find genes associated with diseases of aging and longevity.

To address this question, Promislow plans to observe dogs over their lifetimes. For the next decade, hell collect genetic profiles, owner surveys and data from veterinary checkups.

According to Kate Creevy, a Texas A&M University veterinarian who co-leads the Dog Aging Project with Promislow and Kaeberlein, one of the biggest challenges will be to establish criteria to measure canine aging objectively, because nobody until now has set out to practice canine gerontology. We need something more specific than for me to walk into an exam room and say, Gosh, your dog looks really good, says Creevy.

Creevy and her colleagues are developing metrics that will encompass both physical and mental health, positioning them to investigate the genetics and environments of fast and slow agers, and to see whether similar systemic breakdowns make different breeds of dog susceptible to different diseases.

Daniel Promislow with Frisbee. (Credit: Tammi Kaeberlein)

Kaeberleins contribution to the Dog Aging Project directly complements the longitudinal study headed by Promislow and Creevy. His working hypothesis is that rapamycin targets pathways that contribute to a variety of aging-related diseases, he explains. If rapamycin delays the onset of cancer in golden retrievers and heart disease in Doberman pinschers, he says hell have evidence that there is a molecular biology of aging common to all canines and possibly other mammals.

He has reason to be optimistic. He recently conducted a 10-week study on a couple of dozen middle-aged dogs, testing for side effects of rapamycin. In that brief period, he saw evidence of more youthful heart activity and more affectionate behavior, which might be interpretable as improved cognition.

In an upcoming study, Kaeberlein will give rapamycin or a placebo to 500 middle-aged dogs for three years. Given their maturity, a couple of hundred will probably die in that period. By comparing the lifespan of dogs on the drug with those chowing on placebos, Kaeberlein will be able to determine whether his treatment really works.

He acknowledges the personal disappointments ahead for some participants, but believes the distress will be outweighed by the potential of prolonged life for dogs and humans alike. To a dog person like Kaeberlein, these extra years are a lot more enticing than spending some additional quality time with some long-lived bakers yeast.

The rest is here:
The Drug That Could One Day Help People and Dogs Live Longer - Discover Magazine

Computational analysis of large datasets is becoming increasingly important in many areas of scientific research. This is particularly true in molecular biology, where we study the molecular underpinnings of life. Here, research is broadly classified as wet-lab or dry-lab depending on its nature.

A wet-lab is a traditional experimental laboratory in which scientific research is carried out using chemicals and biological samples (including patient material). These substances or materials require special handling by trained professionals, using sensitive equipment. Such experiments allow us to study some phenomenon, to try and understand or explain what we observe.

A dry-lab is a laboratory where real-world phenomena are studied and analysed using computational, statistical and mathematical techniques. Scientists here build computer models to simulate the occurrence under investigation. The data used to construct these models is usually sourced from wet-lab experiments.

Researchers in wet and dry-labs work in unison to further scientific discovery. For example, computational scientists in a dry-lab identify a handful of promising drugs from a database of millions of molecules. These selected molecules are then physically tested in a wet-lab and the computational results are confirmed or refuted. Molecules which are confirmed with a wet-lab experiment are used to refine further computational searches. More targeted lists of potential drugs for experimental verification are generated in an iterative, cyclic process.

Despite the recent drive to push experiments from in vivo (in living organisms), to in vitro (in a test tube), to in silico (in a silicon chip or computer) to reduce time and cost, it is not possible to conduct proper scientific research without integrating wet and dry approaches.

Researchers in wet-labs and dry-labs have different backgrounds and training. Dry-lab scientists generally have a background in mathematics and computer programming. Wet-lab researchers typically have backgrounds in more traditional sciences and laboratory techniques.

Nowadays, the interdisciplinary nature of modern research requires a researcher to have skills in both areas. Students are particularly encouraged to train in both wet- and dry-lab techniques to gain a feeling and understanding of what interests them most.

Jean Paul Ebejer is a computational scientist who specialises in bioinformatics and computer-aided drug design. Byron Baron is a wet-lab scientist who specialises in protein science. They are both lecturers in dry and wet-lab techniques at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Biobanking at the University of Malta.

Tiny insects called aphids are essentially born pregnant, says Ed Spevak, curator of invertebrates at the St Louis Zoo. Aphids reproduce asexually, producing miniature replicas of themselves, Spevak adds. When that happens, a newly-hatched female has eggs already growing inside of her. Aphids will also use sexual reproduction when their environment say, the weather becomes unpredictable. This ensures offspring are more genetically diverse, and thus healthier and more resilient.

A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells. Conducting a genetic analysis, researchers from Duke University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Texas at El Paso and New York University confirmed that the closest relative of the virus was a coronavirus that infects bats. But that viruss ability to infect humans was gained through exchanging a critical gene fragment from a coronavirus that infects a scaly mammal called a pangolin, which made it possible for the virus to infect humans.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200529161221.htm

For more soundbites, listen to Radio Mocha every Saturday at 7.30pm on Radju Malta and the following Monday at 9pm on Radju Malta 2 https://www.fb.com/RadioMochaMalta/

According to Guinness, Guinness is not black but dark red.

The scientific name for the Plains bison is Bison bison bison.

The WHO estimates that one million healthy life years are lost in Western Europe every year due to noise pollution.

Europes highest railway station is underground (it is found in the Swiss Alps).

Nihonium, number 113 in the periodic table, was created in the lab by firing atoms into each other. The team were successful just three times in over four trillion attempts.

For more trivia, visit http://www.um.edu.mt/think

Independent journalism costs money. Support Times of Malta for the price of a coffee.

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Dry- and wet-lab research: two sides of the same coin - Times of Malta

NEW YORK- While some potential vaccines have emerged in the global race to find a way to stop the spread of COVID-19, many scientists and researchers believe antibody-based therapies hold great promise for treating people already infected with the disease.

How do antibody therapies work?

These therapies use antibodies generated by infected humans or animals to fight off the disease inpatients.

COVID-19:Health dept awaiting 'promising'antibodytests

They date back to the late 19th centurywhen researchers used a serum derived from theblood of infected animals to treat diphtheria.

For COVID-19 treatment, researchers are studying the use of convalescent plasma and othertreatments made with blood from recently recovered patients.

More recently, scientists have developed treatments called monoclonal antibodies -- antibodies thatcan be isolated and manufactured in large quantities to treat diseases like Ebola or cancer.

Companies, like Eli Lilly and Co and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in the United States, are trying touse this approach to develop their treatments.

Unlike convalescent plasma, manufacturers do not need a steady supply of antibody-rich blood toproduce monoclonal antibodies, so this approach could be easier to scale up.

How are they different from vaccines?

In general, the goal of a vaccine is to generate an immune response that can prevent someone fromgetting ill with a disease, whereas antibody-derived products are generally designed to treat disease.And while some drugmakers have suggested antibody treatments can be used prophylactically -

Regeneron's Chief Scientific Officer George Yancopoulos has said their treatment could be a bridgeto a vaccine - it could be expensive.

COVID-19:Survivors donate blood for testing

"You might go into nursing homes or the military and use it because antibodies have a pretty long half-life," said Dr. Betty Diamond, Director of Molecular Medicine at the Feinstein Institutes for MedicalResearch.

"You might decide that you are going to use this as a prevention in this very high risk group, but youwouldn't do that for the whole country."

The amount of protein in antibody drugs makes the treatment more expensive than vaccines ingeneral, Feng Hui, chief operating officer at Shanghai Junshi Biosciences, said.

Antibody drugs contain hundreds, or even over a thousand times more protein than found in a vaccineshot.

Who is developing antibody therapies for COVID-19?

Eli Lilly is collaborating with Junshi and Canadian biotech firm AbCellera Biologics to develop differentantibody treatments, both of which have started early-stage testing in humans.

Regeneron plans to start clinical studies later this month to test its antibody cocktail treatment, whichwas derived from antibodies from genetically-modified mice.

It aims to have hundreds of thousands of preventative doses available "by the end of the summer or the fall."

The CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance, which includes Japan's Takeda Pharmaceuticals and CSL Behring, isworking on hyperimmune globulin therapy derived from convalescent plasma, which could offer astandardized dose of antibodies and doesn't need to be limited to patients with matching blood types.

The Antibody Therapy Against Coronavirus (ATAC) project, funded by the European Commission andled by Sweden's Karolinska research institute, is looking at a similar approach as well as monoclonalantibodies.

Under the project, monoclonal antibodies extracted from convalescent plasma are now being tested on human volunteers in Germany and on animals in Switzerland.

Britain's GlaxoSmithKline is working with Vir Biotechnology Inc to develop potential antibody treatments which select the best antibodies out of the plasma.

AbbVie has also announced a collaboration to develop antibody therapies.

Singapore's state research body A*Star is working with Japan's Chugai Pharmabody Research on anantibody for clinical use.

View post:
EXPLAINER: What are antibody therapies? - eNCA

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COVID-19 has jolted the global discourse on public health into a rapid redo. To be or not to be is no longer a question or topic of debate for digital health. Embracing digital technology and data science for global health is the only way to reverse the pandemic in the short-term, and to make health systems combat-ready for the future ones.

Whether at the national or the global level, the game plan of each country will necessarily include technology-enabled defence and offence strategies to strengthen health systems. The paradigm of preparedness against future health threats will transform digital health; simultaneously, it shall also change the professional profile, skillset and toolbox of frontline health soldiers.

As governments across the world invest in expanding digital and mobile connectivity for integrating technology with health systems, an equally pressing question needs concurrent intervention. Is todays healthcare workforce prepared to deliver a digital future? The answer is a straight no on both dimensions of service preparedness, i.e., capacity and capability.

On global capacity, the total demand for health workers has always outpaced supply, with shortages varying between manageable to stark levels based on a countrys socio-economic status. With COVID-19 proving to be a brutal blow to the best-prepared health systems, health workforce capacity building has become a priority world over. An estimate by the World Health Organisation projects the global aggregate demand for 80.2 million health workers across 165 countries by 2030, whereas the current number is around 48 million.

Trained healthcare personnel, however, cannot be increased in a matter of months. It is a long-drawn process, which must begin soon enough to cover the shortage of millions of health workers. With economies slipping in a downward spiral, there is an added impetus to act quickly. It is well-established that investing in the health sector accelerates employment generation, especially for women and youth. There lies an opportunity to build the capability set of new entrants in health services based on future needs of health eco-systems. In years to come, the delivery and consumption of health will be more technology-driven than ever before. The profile of health workforce of each country must be aligned with the digital health priorities it sets for itself. While the exact construct will differ by country, the broad direction will be a combination of the principles outlined below.

For todays health workers, digitalisation of health systems and implementation of the connected care blueprint in a localised manner will shape new ways of doing their jobs. It will be in a hybrid format, comprising physical and digital care of patients in varied proportions to maximise health outcomes.

Technology integration within clinical services and products will also create new types of jobs to invent and handle public goods or medical products of future (new-age therapeutics, diagnostics and preventive health aides) using a combination of biology and computer science. They will fall at the intersection of medicine, genomics and engineering, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML), robotics, predictive analytics, and more.

It calls for urgent and parallel action by governments to kick-off upskilling and mindset rewiring of professionals in the medical and biopharma domains to adopt digital tools in their practice. The recent use case of telemedicine to deliver virtual care (force-started by COVID-19) is a glimpse into the future of model patient and physician behaviour on technology adoption. Yet, it is not fully reflective of the scale at which evolving trends in healthtech will define the speed and nature of skillset transformation for health workers in primary and tertiary care settings.

To drive the upskilling exercise, it is also critical to gauge the aptitude and willingness of todays health workers to use technology in clinical decision-making.

Pre-covid times have seen stinging debates within the medical community and health policymakers on whether technology will strip healthcare off its essential nature of being high-touch for effective patient care. Questions have been raised if AI tools will depersonalise medicine; if standard of care will dilute, or patient-centricity will be lost if AI/ML algorithms were to read radiology scans and vital signs to present clinical diagnosis or to predict disease prognosis. Legitimate doubts and ethical concerns on patients rights and data privacy have been brought forward. Most importantly, fair scepticism has been raised on safety and trustworthiness of algorithms due to inherent socio-ethnic biases and lack of situational context.

As a result, the digital health discourse has so far seen three types of participants: the Evangelists, who strongly believe that healthtech will catapult countries to meet sustainable development goals; the Cynics, who have raised many of the above questions; and the Opposers, who view technology as a threat to their careers or as an unwanted intrusion in the age-old, sacred practice of medicine.

Post covid, the narrative has stepped up considerably to gain the attention of the healthcare community around the world. The goings-on have led many Cynics and Opposers to shift their position into the solution-seeking quadrant, to coalesce into a new category of Constructive Critics. Together, the Evangelists and the Constructive Critics will form a powerful community to extract the most-balanced and effective benefits of digital and AI/ML technology in healthcare delivery, without diluting patient-centricity, data security and privacy rights. They will also be the change catalysts, who will lay down the foundation and constructs of the new system to work as inter-disciplinary teams, and to train and arm the workforce of today with digital skills.

As a long-term goal, cultivating aptitude and imparting new skills to create a digital-savvy health workforce of the future calls for considerable reform in the medical education system. This will need a redesign of curricula, training methods and skill evaluation techniques. In addition, student selection criteria and aptitude tests for clinical careers will have to be revamped.

Institutional frameworks of medical and nursing schools will have to create flexible claw-ins with technical education institutes to co-develop matrixed pedagogy programmes. For example, a medical science, nursing, or paramedical student would necessarily have to take credit courses in computer science, bio-engineering, mathematics or allied disciplines. Similarly, it will be essential for engineering and mathematics students to partake selective medical courses, to gain insights and orientation on experiences and challenges of patients and health workers in clinical settings to conceive future digital products for the healthcare and life sciences sectors. Selection and training for primary health workers will also incorporate digital literacy as an essential requirement.

Few countries such as the UK and Australia had begun deliberation on their workforce strategy to enable digital health last year. For example, in 2019, the National Health Service, UK identified genomics, telemedicine and AI-based technologies as thrust areas to plan training and education of their future workforce.

To sum-up, the future will have inter-professional teams working in collaboration to co-create and monitor learning systems behind clinical decision making digital tools. Frontrunners for these roles will be the ones with a combination skillset in technology and clinical sciences or techlinical. All health workers will be digital-savvy to deploy these tools in care settings to improve patient outcomes. The combined effect of both will increase efficiency and effectiveness of delivery at a systemic level. As predicted by digital health evangelist, Dr.Eric Topol (Professor of Molecular Medicine, Scripps Research Translational Institute), use of AI and technology-aides in medicine will create time and space to deliver real healing to the patients.

See more here:
Health Workforce of the Digital Future: Techlinical Cross-products - Observer Research Foundation

Artistic illustration of the light compressed below the silver nanocubes randomly placed over the graphene-based heterostructure. Credit: Matteo Ceccanti

Miniaturization has enabled so many unfathomable dreams. Shrinking down electronic circuits has allowed us to access technology like smartphones, health watches, medical probes, nano-satellites, unthinkable a couple decades ago. Just imagine that in the course of 60 years, the transistor has gone from being the size of your hand palm to 14 nanometers in dimension, 1000 times smaller than the diameter of a hair.

Miniaturization has pushed technology to a new era of optical circuitry. But, in parallel, it has also triggered new challenges and obstacles to overcome, for example, on how to deal with controlling and guiding light at the nanometer scale. New techniques have been on the rise searching for ways to confine light into extremely tiny spaces, millions of times smaller than current ones. Researchers had earlier on found that metals can compress light below the wavelength-scale (diffraction limit).

In that aspect, Graphene a material composed from a single layer of carbon atoms, with exceptional optical and electrical properties, is capable of guiding light in the form of plasmons, which are oscillations of electrons that are strongly interacting with light. These graphene plasmons have a natural ability to confine light to very small spaces. However, until now it was only possible to confine these plasmons in one direction, while the actual ability of light to interact with small particles, like atoms and molecules, resides in the volume that it can be compressed into. This type of confinement, in all three dimensions, is commonly regarded as an optical cavity.

In a recent study published in Science, ICFO researchers Itai Epstein, David Alcaraz, Varum-Varma Pusapati, Avinash Kumar, Tymofiy Khodkow, led by ICREA Prof. at ICFO Frank Koppens, in collaboration with researchers from MIT, Duke University, Universit Paris-Saclay, and Universidad do Minho, have succeeded to build a new type of cavity for graphene plasmons, by integrating metallic cubes of nanometer sizes over a graphene sheet. Their approach enabled to realize the smallest optical cavity ever built for infrared light, which is based on these plasmons.

In their experiment, they used silver nanocubes of 50 nanometers in size, which were sprinkled randomly on top of the graphene sheet, with no specific pattern or orientation. This allowed each nanocube, together with graphene, to act as a single cavity. Then they sent infrared light through the device and observed how the plasmons propagated into the space between the metal nanocube and the graphene, being compressed only to that very small volume.

As Itai Epstein, first author of the study, comments, the main obstacle that we encountered in this experiment resided in the fact that the wavelength of light in the infrared range is very large and the cubes are very small, about 200 times smaller, so it is extremely difficult to make them interact with each other.

In order to overcome this, they used a special phenomenon when the graphene plasmons interacted with the nanocubes, they were able to generate a special resonance, called a magnetic resonance. As Epstein clarifies, A unique property of the magnetic resonance is that it can act as a type of antenna that bridges the difference between the small dimensions of the nanocube and the large scale of the light. Thus, the generated resonance maintained the plasmons moving between the cube and graphene in a very small volume, which is ten billion times smaller than the volume of regular infrared light, something never achieved before in optical confinement. Even more so, they were able to see that the single graphene-cube cavity, when interacting with the light, acted as a new type of nano-antenna that is able to scatter the infrared light very efficiently.

The results of the study are extremely promising for the field of molecular and biological sensing, important for medicine, biotechnology, food inspection or even security, since this approach is capable of intensifying the optical field considerably and thus detect molecular materials, which usually respond to infrared light.

As Prof. Koppens states such achievement is of great importance because it allows us to tune the volume of the plasmon mode to drive their interaction with small particles, like molecules or atoms, and be able to detect and study them. We know that the infrared and Terahertz ranges of the optical spectrum provide valuable information about vibrational resonances of molecules, opening the possibility to interact and detect molecular materials as well as use this as a promising sensing technology.

Reference: Far-field Excitation of Single Graphene Plasmon Cavities with Ultra-compressed Mode-volumes by Itai Epstein, David Alcaraz, Zhiqin Huang, Varun-Varma Pusapati, Jean-Paul Hugonin, Avinash Kumar, Xander M. Deputy, Tymofiy Khodkov, Tatiana G. Rappoport, Jin-Yong Hong, Nuno M. R. Peres, Jing Kong, David R. Smith and Frank H. L. Koppens, 12 June 2020, Science.DOI: 10.1126/science.abb1570

Read more here:
Unfathomable Miniaturization: Smallest Cavity for Light Realized by Graphene Plasmons - SciTechDaily